Book review: Designer's guide to Mac OS X Tiger

[Magnus]

"Designer's Guide to Mac OS X Tiger" by Jeff Gamet is a new book published by Peachpit Press. From the cover we learn that the book focuses on the "Tiger features that matter most to illustrators, designers, and other graphic professionals."

This 272-page book is a bit hard to categorize. If you pick up something like "Learning Unix for Mac OS X Tiger" you know it's going to be pretty "techy" and too advanced for a new user. On the other hand if you look at something like "Mac OS X Tiger For Dummies" you know it's good for beginners but advanded users may find it too basic.

In brief, this is a good book for someone working in a graphic environment but has yet to use Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger. If you're a user of a previous Mac OS and want to upgrade or have already upgraded this book gives you a good all-around introduction to what the new OS has to offer.

It starts by going through the Finder and some new features there, like Spotlight. Chapter 2 covers fonts, where they are stored, differences in Tiger, how to optimize font handling, and more. Chapter 3 in a similar way handles printing. Further chapters cover PDF, ColorSync, .Mac, Security, and more.

What I would have liked to see included was more coverage of web isses, including web browsers and web standards. In fact, Safari is not even in the index. Many graphics professionals deal a lot with the web and it would have been nice to see an overview of these issues from a Tiger perspective. Perhaps the author and editors felt that was beyond the scope of this book.

All in all, it's a well written book that is easy to read and follow. It's a bit hard to see exactly where it fits in. It does package a lot of important information into one relatively small book. For anyone in graphics, design, printing, and similar fields, that needs to know about what Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger offers, this is a good book. You could probably find all of this information on the web and in other books but here it is all collected in one place and presented in a nice format.