Mac OS X Hacks - Get this book!

Mac OS X hacks book cover, which you can't judge the book by

Last week, I picked up the new O'Reilly book Mac OS X Hacks by Rael Dornfest & Kevin Hemenway, not quite sure what to expect.

Wow. This is a real must-have book for Mac OS X power users. The term "hacks" is usually not quite the right term. Sure, there are techniques for controlling iTunes via the Web and altering your user interface. But for the most part, it's a tour of many of Mac OS X's capabilities that I didn't know about, or seemed harder to access than they really are. (And this is coming from somebody who has used Unix for almost two decades and is a regular reader of MacOSXHints!) Instead, it's more of a "How-To" book.

Some randomly selected highlights:

How to remove stubborn locked files
Setting up an MP3 streaming "radio station"
Sending SMS messages via Address Book
Saving Terminal settings to presets
Turning your Mac into a router to share internet connectivity
VPN/SSH tunneling
Setting up an IMAP server
Using Perl, AppleScript, PHP from Apache
Setting up MySQL and Postgres databases

It's much, much better than many other OSX books, including O'Reilly's lightweight Leaning Unix for Mac OS X.