O'Reilly Rocks!

Time for some long belated, well-deserved kudos to a company who has become perhaps my favourite source of technical manuals. No, it's not EDN's sibling organization, Elsevier (although, hey, they publish great books too!). It's O'Reilly Media, who over the years has cranked out literally hundreds of tomes, for both software developers and end users, and for Linux, Mac OS, Windows, cross-platform environments such as Java, and even beyond-the-computer applications.

Below I'll provide a short list of books I've found particularly useful, focused on Mac OS and Windows (I have a stack of Linux manuals here, too, to crack open whenever I find the time to take the plunge into that O/S as well). But before I do, let me also draw your attention to O'Reilly's Make, a quarterly magazine devoted to those of us who can't seem to resist tearing apart and otherwise 'improving' whatever piece of gear passes across our desks (along with inventing gear that can't yet be purchased, or hand-crafting something that is prohibitively expensive at retail). As Make's editor and publisher, Dale Dougherty, says in his introduction:

"Make is a new magazine dedicated to showing how to make technology work for you. At the core of the magazine are projects that show you how to use technology in interesting and practical ways. A MAKE project is rewarding and fun as an experience, and it produces something you can share with your friends and family. Becoming a maker is a lot like learning how to become a better cook – you can follow or improvise upon the work of masters".

Before you subscribe, take a look at the 192-page premier issue's table of contents, and at the feedback at Slashdot. The folks over at ARS Technica took a stab at one of the projects, building their own $14 videocamera stabilizer; I confess that after reading it, I chickened out and dropped $45 (plus $12 shipping) on a pre-built one from the article author. I also finally know what 'Bunnie' Huang, who famously hacked the Xbox with a Xilinx FPGA while at MIT, and with whom I've been on-and-off conversing over the past few years over email, looks like. He contributed an article, too.

Now for that book list:

Mac OS X:
Mac OS X Panther Hacks
Mac OS X Panther in a Nutshell
Mac OS X Power Hound
Running Mac OS X Panther

Mac OS X Converts from Unix:
Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther
Mac OS X Panther for Unix Geeks

Windows:
Windows XP Annoyances for Geeks
Windows XP Hacks
Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual
Windows XP in a Nutshell
Windows XP Pro: The Missing Manual

And, for off-hours 'lighter' reading:
Revolution in the Valley
The Cult of Mac