chuqui@nsc.UUCP (Chuq Von Rospach) (10/06/85)
Hayden Books, who have recently published the wonderful Chernicoff books
"Macintosh Revealed" has come out with the book "MacBooks -- the
Indispensable Guide to Macintosh Hardware and Software" by Arthur Naiman
(Hayden Macintosh Library, $14.95).
It isn't. Naiman, best known for his book "Introduction to
Wordstar", is attempting to pull together all of the information that isn't
in the Macintosh manuals. Unfortunately, the book reads like a poorly
researched first draft. There are a number of places where Naiman simply
doesn't know what he is talking about (he evidently doesn't know about the
hidden Desktop file, since he bitches about a 400K disk that always seems
to have 2 or 3K mysteriously missing) that make me wonder whether he
bothered to really understand what he was doing before he wrote the book.
The book is based on Finder 1.1g, even though the Macintosh Revealed books
used the newer system software and were published first. This means that
parts of the book are out of date, useless, or simply misleading. If they
were able to get the MR series updated, I don't see any reason why they
couldn't have gotten this book updated either. In general it is very
shallow, slipshod, and looks like a quick hack aimed at the market that
doesn't know any better.
Two areas that Naiman HAS played with, though, are fonts and macpaint. He
has put together a listing of all the fonts (commercial and public) that he
knows about, and gives samples in an appendix. There are curious (and
serious) holes in this, though -- especially the widely distributed (even
on this network) 2 disk set of fonts from UTexas. All are missing, and if
Naiman had checked into a couple of users groups or BBS's, they would have
shown up -- again an indication of lack of research. He has put a fair
amount of page space and work into tracking down and documenting the
'option' characters and to try to explain the international characters
available, but the explanation comes out muddled and inconsistent.
His macpaint chapter is pretty good, especially at trying to bring forward
things that aren't spelled out clearly in the 'manual' (using the word
loosely) that Apple provides. Again, though, there are lots of well known
undocumented features (double clicking the eraser is an example) that he
never seems to have found out.
When I bought my Mac last December, I picked up a book called "Macintosh,
the appliance of the future" by Gerard Lewis. In comparing that book
(written while the Mac was still in the macwrite/macpaint and dreaming
stage) against the Naiman book, I find that there is more useful
information (and presented better) in the book I bought a year ago. If
you're looking for a general guide to the Mac, look elsewhere (anyone want
to make suggestions?) This is a sloppily done, under-researched and more or
less useless book that should never have been published.
--
:From under the bar at Callahan's: Chuq Von Rospach
nsc!chuqui@decwrl.ARPA {decwrl,hplabs,ihnp4,pyramid}!nsc!chuqui
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