Requirements

There are a few requirements for effectively using this book. Odds are, you already have all of them covered.

Adventurous and enthusiastic attitude

This is the most important requirement. If you meet this one, you will be able to master the others or do without them. Learning Unix is about learning a richly diverse collection of tools that are part of a lively ecosystem of software development. Unix is an environment for collaborative computing, and by stepping into it, you become part of an ongoing human phenomenon .

OK, enough philosophy. Here are the technical requirements:

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger

This book is based on Mac OS X version 10.4 Tiger. All the examples in this book should work with Mac OS X 10.4.2. If you have an earlier version of Mac OS X, then a few things will be different from their descriptions in this book.

Be an administrator

You must be logged in as an administrative user for many of the tasks covered in this book, particularly for installing software and conducting system-admin tasks . If you aren't sure what an administrative user is, go to the Help menu in the Finder and search on administrative user

Have the Developer Tools installed

Many important parts of this book require that you have the Mac OS X Developer Tools installed. This is a collection of software included with Mac OS X but not always installed by default.

Depending on which version of Mac OS X you have, the Developer Tools may already be installed. If you have a folder called Developer at the top level of your hard drive, then the Developer Tools are installed. Figure 0.4 shows a Finder window with the Developer folder highlighted.

Figure 0.4. A Finder window showing the top level of the system disk. The folder containing the Developer Tools is highlighted.

The Developer Tools may be on a separate DVD or CD that you must install. If you don't have the DVD or CD, there may be an installer application in your Applications folder (in the Installers folder). Also, you can find links to download the Developer Tools from Apple's "Tools" page (http://developer.apple.com/tools) or Developer Connection site: http://connect.apple.com. You will need a (free) Developer Connection account to use the site.

Connection to the Internet

Many of the tasks in the book assume that your machine is connected to the Internet, particularly those tasks involving interacting with other machines over networks.