For personal computer users of every stripe, Mac OS X is a whole new ballgame. It combines Apple's trademark visual elegance with the underlying stability of UNIX, which adds up to a rock-solid, gorgeous operating system.

Unfortunately, learning Mac OS X is also whole new ballgame. As author David Pogue notes in his introduction, "Mac OS X" is a misnomer--it isn't really the Mac OS at all; there's scarcely a single line of code in common with the tangled, ancient code of the older Mac OS. Hundreds of features have been removed, added, or moved around.

Few in the world are more qualified to guide Mac users through the undocumented jungle of Mac OS X than David Pogue, triple-award-winning former Macworld columnist and author of the best-selling Mac OS 9: The Missing Manual. His new book shines light on both the broad strokes and the fine points of Mac OS X version 10.1, including understanding its UNIX-like folder structure, setting up an office network, capitalizing on its rich Internet features, and even hacking the real power of the UNIX underbelly by summoning the command-line interface. Mac OS X: The Missing Manual also covers each of the control panels and bonus programs that comes with Mac OS X, including iTunes, Mail, Sherlock, and Apache, the built-in Web-server.

For Mac users who have become accustomed to the older Mac OS, Appendix A, the "Where'd It Go?" dictionary, may be worth the price of the book all by itself. It's an alphabetical listing of every feature that was once in Mac OS 9, complete with an explanation of what became of it in Mac OS X.

Through it all, Pogue shows off the refreshing humor, technical insight, and crystal-clear, plain-English prose that made number one best-sellers out of his other books in the Missing Manual series, including Mac OS 9, Windows Me, and iMovie 2.

Widely esteemed Mac authority David Pogue weighs in on the latest offering from Cupertino with Mac OS X: The Missing Manual. It's a fact-packed romp through the operating system and the extras that come with it, made resoundingly more readable by the depth of Pogue's knowledge, his familiarity with Mac history, and his eagerness to engage novices as members of the Mac user community. Unlike most books about Mac OS X, this one explores its Unix-like underpinnings (the Apple implementation is called Darwin) pretty thoroughly. However, based on the logic that if you wanted to use Unix, you would, Pogue emphasizes the traditional, graphical Mac interface over the Terminal window.

Pogue, who's written about Macs for years and whose professional qualifications extend beyond computers (he's an orchestral conductor), writes about Macs at the user level with clarity. He's also quite good at dealing with the numerous options and variations that apply to Mac procedures, and makes very good use of sidebars for clarifying details. In a section on printing, for example, Pogue explains why there's no longer an option to turn off background printing (true multitasking has rendered the option obsolete). There's also good coverage of the online iTools, tailored to people unfamiliar with integrating remote resources into their personal computing environments. --David Wall

Topics covered: Apple Mac OS X for people who will use the operating system, either on a standalone computer with Internet access or on a computer that is part of a home or organizational network. Running applications (in Classic mode as well as in native Mac OS X mode), printing, networking, multimedia, security (including Keychain), and utilities are all covered.