Is there any UNIX? It scares me.

Mac OS X is built on UNIX, but don't worryit pretty much stays out of your way. Here's a way to think of it: The pilots of commercial airliners use engines to fly the plane, right? But if they want to start the engines, they don't climb out on each wing and manually crank them upthey do it from up in the cockpit with a flick of a switch. That's kind of like Mac OS X's relationship with UNIX. You're up front in the cockpit running things, you push Macintosh buttons, and UNIX responds (quite brilliantly, I might add), without you having to get your hands dirty.

The vast majority of people who use Mac OS X will never mess with its UNIX "soul" directly (by "mess with," I mean altering their system by writing UNIX command lines. It's not for the faint of heart, because in some cases if you make a mistake while coding, you can seriously mess up your Mac). That's why I decided not to include UNIX tips in the bookI didn't want to have a situation where the vast majority of the book's readers would see a UNIX chapter and go, "Oh, that's not for me." I wanted everybody to have the chance to use every single tip, in every single chapter.

TIP

You're doing it again! Stop looking at these sidebars. See, they're intoxicatingyou're drawn to them even after you know it's not really a tip. Okay, here's a real tip: If you like sidebar tips, buy this book.