Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition

Product Description

Is Windows giving you pause? Ready to make the leap to the Mac instead? There has never been a better time to switch from Windows to Mac, and this incomparable guide will help you make a smooth transition. New York Times columnist and Missing Manuals creator David Pogue gets you past three challenges: transferring your stuff, assembling Mac programs so you can do what you did with Windows, and learning your way around Mac OS X.

Why is this such a good time to switch? Upgrading from one version of Windows to another used to be simple. But now there's Windows Vista, a veritable resource hog that forces you to relearn everything. Learning a Mac is not a piece of cake, but once you do, the rewards are oh-so-much better. No viruses, worms or spyware. No questionable firewalls, inefficient permissions, or other strange features. Just a beautiful machine with a thoroughly reliable system. And if you're still using Windows XP, we've got you covered, too.

If you're ready to take on Mac OS X Leopard, the latest edition of this bestselling guide tells you everything you need to know:

* Transferring your stuff -- Moving photos, MP3s, and Microsoft Office documents is the easy part. This book gets you through the tricky things: extracting your email, address book, calendar, Web bookmarks, buddy list, desktop pictures, and MP3 files.


* Re-creating your software suite -- Big-name programs (Word, Photoshop, Firefox, Dreamweaver, and so on) are available in both Mac and Windows versions, but hundreds of other programs are available only for Windows. This guide identifies the Mac equivalents and explains how to move your data to them.


* Learning Leopard -- Once you've moved into the Mac, a final task awaits: Learning your way around. Fortunately, you're in good hands with the author of Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, the #1 bestselling guide to the Macintosh.

Moving from Windows to a Mac successfully and painlessly is the one thing Apple does not deliver. Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Leopard Edition is your ticket to a new computing experience.

Product Details

* Amazon Sales Rank: #2338 in Books
* Published on: 2008-02-26
* Original language: English
* Number of items: 1
* Binding: Paperback
* 608 pages

Editorial Reviews

About the Author
David Pogue is the personal-technology columnist for the New York Times, a contributor to CBS Sunday Morning, a frequent guest on NPR's Morning Edition, and a Discovery Channel series host. As the creator and primary author of the objective and entertaining Missing Manual computer book series, David is also one of the world's bestselling how-to authors. Titles in the series include Mac OS X, Vista, Windows XP, iPod, Microsoft Office, iPhoto, Dreamweaver, the Internet, iMovie, and many others.
Customer Reviews

If This Is your First Mac, Get The Book Before You Use The Mac4
I was going to give this book 5 stars until I read the review that mentioned that formating isn't found in the index. He's right. I also checked "Mac OS X Leopard Bible" and also "Mac OS X 10.5" Quick Start Guide, and it isn't in either of those two either. I recently bought a digital photo frame and discovered that photos wouldn't load directly on it, the SD card wasn't even recognized as being available. So then I tried to format it on my PC in NTSC, and same thing. I tried FAT and only had slightly under 200 MB on a 4GB card available. Finally I used FAT 32 and it worked. I haven't tried it on my iMac yet - big question. So where are the answers?

That being said, I made the mistake of not buying this book before I tried to use the new iMac. I've used PCs for 25 years, and MS has partitioned my brain into Windows. I made the switch because of all the hoo-rah about the wonderful multi-media integration on the Mac. I won't describe all the wheel-spinning I did for months, but on a PC, when you do a 3rd party software downwload, you often get the query, would you like to create a shortcut. Try to find the word "shortcut" in Mac Help, or in the indexes of the two other books mentioned above. The word just isn't there. I know, this is simple stuff, but if you don't know that alias = shortcut in the Mac world, you're out of luck. I had heard so often that Mac and Apple were "intuitive," so it's a word I now despise. If your brain is Windows partitioned like mine is, there's nothing intuitive about a Mac, until you reconfigure your cranial neurons to Mac OS X. Then it's pretty nice.

I was ready to give my iMac to one of my daughters and go crawling back to Microsoft, when I decided to get this book. It opened up many of the possibilities for me, and I quickly purchased a few other titles in Pogue's Missing Manual series, and now I'm off and running, enjoying the new Mac. I think I'll keep it. Based on the format issue, I'll give this book 4 stars, but I would still buy it and recommend it to other switchers. Do yourself a favor, buy the book before you start aimlessly frustrating yourself and blindly plowing around Mac World. And buy a few other books after reading some of these reviews. You'll need 'em.

Computer Book4
Helped me out a little, still some confussion but then again i dont know much about this stuff.

Full of padding & childish prattle3
Designed for school teachers and there ignorant,insolent students.Very irritating to read.With the usual padding to justify 900 pages.Annoying when your looking for an answer.The simple things are over explained (as usual with these books).If you bailed out of windows from frustration , don't buy this book.The info's there (hence 3 stars)but in a world where every device has a program that has to be learned who whats to read endless silly woffle when you looking for an answer?
Where are the manuals with intelligent schematics diagrams that show you the logic of steps so you learn the underlying thought flow and therefore learn where to look for the answers.One of Google's great virtues.