From the Publisher

From the Introduction

MacOS Catalina is the 16th major version of Apple’s operating system. It’s got very little in common with the original Mac OS, the one that saw Apple through the 80s & 90s. Apple dumped that in 2001, when CEO Steve Jobs decided it was time for a change. Apple had spent too many years piling new features onto a software foundation originally poured in 1984. Programmers and customers complained of the “spaghetti code” the Mac OS had become.

So today, underneath macOS’s classy, shining desktop is Unix, the industrial-strength, rock-solid OS that drives many a website and university. It’s not new by any means; in fact, it’s decades old & has been polished by generations of programmers.

To find your way around macOS Catalina, you’re expected to use Apple’s online help system. As you’ll quickly discover, these help pages are tersely written, offer very little technical depth, lack useful examples, and provide no tutorials whatsoever.

The purpose of this book, then, is to serve as the manual that should have accompanied macOS—version 10.15 in particular. Whether you have an antique, hand-cranked 2012 iMac or a shiny new model, this is your guide.

If you’re a Mac veteran, on the other hand, keep your eye out for similar shaded boxes called “Power Users’ Clinic.” They offer more-technical tips, tricks, and shortcuts.

david pogue, macOS, Catalina, The Missing Manual

When you write a book like this, you do a lot of soul-searching about how much to cover. Of course, a thinner book, or at least a thinner-looking one, is always preferable; plenty of readers are intimidated by a book that dwarfs the Tokyo White Pages. On the other hand, Apple keeps adding features and rarely takes them away.

That’s why some chapters come with free downloadable appendixes—PDF documents, available on this book’s “Missing CD” page —that go into further detail on some of the tweakiest features. (You’ll see references to them sprinkled throughout the book.)

Maybe this idea will save a few trees—and a few back muscles when you try to pick this book up.