My New Mac: 52 Simple Projects to Get You Started Review

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(More customer reviews)I'm a Macintosh tech. Just perusing the excerpt of this book available on Amazon, I found a couple errors. First'', he says that pressing the power button will bring up the Shut Down dialog. This is only true of laptops and certain very old Macs which had the power button on the keyboard. All current non-laptops will by default just go to sleep if you press the power button.
He then recommends the keystroke combination "CTRL-OPTION-ESC" as a way to shut down your Mac if it is frozen. This too is incorrect. To begin with, that keystroke does nothing whatsoever. The keystroke he is looking for is "COMMAND-OPTION-ESC"... and even that keystroke doesn't shut down your Mac. Instead it brings up a list of programs you can force to quit.
Since it seems this book is targeted at beginners, every small error like these will cause considerable confusion and frustration. Whether the rest of the book is like this, I do not know, but felt a review might be helpful to someone. Best of luck!

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You finally took the plunge and bought a Mac. Whether yours is a MacBook, Mac Pro, Mac mini, or iMac &mdash it's still a Mac, and it runs the Macintosh operating system, Mac OS X. But what do you do with your Mac after you turn it on? Do you even know how to turn it on and off properly or put it to sleep? You need a book like My New Mac to make everything easy. Wallace Wang, author of the best-selling Steal This Computer Book, will show you, step-by-step, how to use tools like iPhoto to organize your photos, track birthdays with iCal, and clip and save information from the Internet so you can find it again. You'll find simple projects that will show you how to:

Organize your files and folders by color and keyword
View stocks, flights, and the weather
Set up and manage parental controls to limit your children's computer and Internet access
Play and burn CDs and DVDs
Transfer photos from your digital camera to your computer
Share songs, images, and documents wirelessly between Macs
Don't put off learning how to use your new computer. Let Wallace Wang show you the ropes with My New Mac.

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The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide: For Developers and Designers Using Flash: For Developers and Designers Using Flash CS4 Professional (Adobe Developer Library) Review

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(More customer reviews)I was browsing at Borders at Park Ave and 57th, where they had exactly one copy of this. I'd heard of this book but hadn't seen it yet--it was announced over the summer but O'Reilly kept delaying publication so the book could be current with Flash CS4. I looked up a few items in the ToC and index, and went straight to the checkout queue. I had to have this book right away! even if Amazon could sell it to me cheaper!
Okay, why is the book good? I've spent more time with it now. I'll give you my three biggest reasons:
1) It's readable. It really is. It's friendly and accessible. Did you ever enjoy those juvenile histories and biographies and How-and-Why science books that started out with something like, "Hi! This is a fun book, and we're going to take you on a fun journey, step-by-step. This is a great subject to be interested in! Aren't you happy? Well, we are!!!"?
Well, did you like books like that? I did, and I've always resented scholarly and technical books that didn't introduce themselves along those lines. So many of them are written like resentful documentation: "Go away. We hate you. This is only for ugly, squirrelly, socially backward people like US."
This book is overtly addressed to users of ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0, and those already using 3.0; to artists, designers, and developers of all stripes. It's all-inclusive. Like Rich Shupe's Learning ActionScript 3.0, it has a friendly, hand-holding attitude that goes through the length of the book.
2) A personal obsession: this book has a good section on how to write XML loaders that use HTML. This is a very poorly documented area of Flash. The ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook had a little bit on it, but the explanation was hard to follow and the code was buggy.
3) Another personal interest: SWF loaders and unloaders. This is the first book I've seen that tells you how to unload both the thing loaded and the "event listener" that keeps sitting there, using up processor time and space.
The book is also current with the less traditional Flash-related technologies, such as FlashDevelop and Flex.

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"No matter what your background, the pages that follow will provide you with some excellent knowledge, insight, and even a little bit of wisdom in the realm of Flash and ActionScript. Happy learning!" -- Branden Hall, from the Foreword Written by Flash insiders with extensive knowledge of the technology, this guide is designed specifically to help Flash designers and developers make the leap from ActionScript 2.0 to the new object-oriented ActionScript 3.0 quickly and painlessly. Formatted so you can find any topic easily, ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide explains:

Object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts, such as packages and classes
ActionScript 3.0 features and player enhancements that improve performance
Workflow differences between ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0 including tools, code editing, component sets, and image and font rendering
Where did it go? A guide to help you find familiar features in ActionScript 3.0, such as global functions, operators, properties, and statements
How do I? Step-by-step solutions for performing tasks with ActionScript 3.0, including input, sound, video, display, events, text, and more

Also included are overviews of Flash and ActionScript features and workflows. ActionScript 3.0 is a huge upgrade to Flash's programming language -- and this guide helps you upgrade your skills to match it.

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