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Mac OS X Lion on Demand (2nd Edition) ReviewThe first thing you'll notice when leafing through this book is that it has a highly structured layout. For the most part, all of its information is presented in the form of "To do such-and-such a task, follow these steps..." Each chapter has a brief introduction that gives a general overview of the task or tasks to be described, and within the chapter there may be a section titled "Understanding ___" such as "Understanding Printers" in the chapter on Printing and Faxing. There are also occasional smaller sidebar sections titled "Did You Know?", "See Also", and "For Your Information." But the large majority of the book is taken up with step-by-step instructions.
These step-by-step instructions are generally very clear, accompanied by full-color screenshots which are often annotated with red-circled numbers that connect some part of the image to a particular numbered step in the text. I think this layout makes the book an easy-to-use reference, but there are some downsides to the structure. There are also some weaknesses in the book apart from the way it's laid out.
Looking at the chapter on "Working with Mac OS X Along with Windows" provides some examples. This chapter explains how to use Apple's Boot Camp software to install Windows on a Mac so that the machine can be booted to either Windows or Mac OS X. Here, in no particular order, are some problems I found with this chapter:
* Despite the generality of the chapter title, the text only talks about Apple's Boot Camp; the third-party options for obtaining a similar result (which don't require rebooting your computer), such as VMware Fusion and Parallels, are never so much as mentioned.
* The step-by-step instructions explain how to launch the Boot Camp Assistant application; there's no assumption that the reader knows how to perform application-launching.
* In explaining the minimum requirements for installing Windows, it's said that you need a USB or built-in keyboard. At first this seems like absurd information-overkill, until you realize what the text ought to say: That you can't perform the installation if you're using a wireless keyboard.
* Also in minimum requirements, it's stated that you need Mac OS X version 10.7 or later. Elsewhere in the same chapter it (correctly) says that you need Mac OS X 10.4.6 or later.
* It's noted (with a boldface "Important") that a hard drive partition larger than 32 GB can't be formatted as a FAT volume, but no explanation is given as to what a FAT volume is. (And this in the same text that assumes you need to be told how to launch an application.)
* The instructions tell you Boot Camp drivers have to be installed after the Windows installation, and these are available "on your Mac OS X Lion installation disk." This is presumably left over from earlier editions of this book; there is no "Mac OS X Lion installation disk," and the Lion version of Boot Camp Assistant provides a different method of installing the drivers.
And so on. I'm sure there are hundreds of points like this sprinkled throughout the book. Some of them stem from the rigid structure of the book (if you treat each topic as a stand-alone how-to, then each topic is probably going to explain how to launch an application), while others are just plain goofs or oversights.
But all in all, I think the book is a decent value. I'm not a novice user, but I learned a lot from this book, and I'm happy to have it on hand as a reference.
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