Phil Gross, Mike Gross

Stephen Kochan

Brian Jepson, Ernest E. Rothman It's about time: Mac OS X for Unix Geeks arrives on the scene none too soon for UNIX aficionados who, having heard that the latest editions of Mac OS are based on a UNIX variant, want to see how the platform compares to more venerable versions of the eminently configurable operating system. This book highlights some key differences between the Darwin environment and more conventional UNIXs, enabling people with UNIX experience to take advantage of it as they learn the Mac OS X way of doing things at the command line.

This slim volume neither aims to teach its readers UNIX nor introduces them to the Mac, but rather to show how Apple has implemented UNIX. It's a fast read that assumes—as the title implies—rather a lot of UNIX knowledge. With that requirement satisfied and this book in hand, you're likely to discover aspects of Aqua much more quickly than you otherwise would have.

The authors spend lots of time explaining how administrative tasks—such as managing groups, users and passwords—are handled in the Mac OS environment. They document netinfo fully, and call attention to its limitations (such as its inability to create home directories for users) by explaining how to do the job on the command line. They also cover C programming in the Darwin universe at greater length than any other book, providing explicit instructions for such important tasks as creating header files and linking static libraries. A guide to the command line (they call the reference section "The Missing Manpages") provides good value at this book's conclusion. —David Wall, Amazon.com

Apple Computer Inc, James Duncan Davidson

Jonathan Zdziarski

Jeff Tapper, Matt Boles, James Talbot, Ben Elmore, Mike Labriola

G. Bronson, S. Menconi

Joey Lott, Darron Schall, Keith Peters

David Gelphman, Bunny Laden

OpenGL Architecture Review Board, Dave Shreiner, Mason Woo, Jackie Neider, Tom Davis

Robert P. Kuehne, J. D. Sullivan

Kari Pulli

Bruce Eckel Programming languages have similarities with general purpose languages such as Spanish. You might know enough Spanish to cobble together a simple letter or read a poster but the real breakthrough comes when you can think in it. Thinking in Java attempts to improve your understanding to the point where you can think about a programming problem in Java rather than in English or whatever and then translate it. This fits extremely well with the basic Java ethos, which is to enable you to frame a problem in terms of the Java objects you'll use to provide a solution.

Eckel approaches teaching you to think in Java by introducing a topic, talking around it to put it in context, providing examples to try and then discussing them in depth. Each chapter has a summary followed by exercises. The book is structured for someone coming from a procedural language background. Eckel spends a lot of time on OOP concepts in general and the way in which it's implemented in Java. After covering operators Eckel goes on to program flow, initialisation and garbage collection, packages, class reuse, polymorphism and so on all the way up to distributed programming (servlets) and appendices on passing objects, the JNI, guidelines and resources. The whole book is also on CD (in several formats including HTML) with the source code (guaranteed to compile under Linux using Java 1.2.2). The CD also contains Thinking in C: Foundations for C++and Java.

Thinking In Java is basically a tutorial. You're intended to read it linearly and work the exercises. It helps that it's well written but it helps even more to have a programming background. If not, you'll probably want a straight Java reference to hand as well. —Steve Patient