Chapter 6. Networking

John Donne said, "No Mac is an island." OK, he really said, "No man is an island," but the point is the same. Our Macs, just like us, are interconnected and function as parts of an integrated system. The bottom line is that your Mac is of little value if you can't move the projects you design on it to other computers and printers.

A network is a combination of computers that are connected together so that they can exchange information and share resources, such as printers and Internet connections. Sometimes, creating a network involves connecting the devices with wires, or Ethernet. Other times, the devices on a network are connected using radio waves. Apple's brand name for wireless network connections is AirPort Extreme; the rest of the world calls it Wi-Fi. Networks can even have a mix of Ethernet-connected devices and AirPort Extremeconnected devices, depending on how you set everything up.

Apple has done a pretty good job of making networking easy on us. So easy, in fact, that you may already be disproving the old myths like "Macs and Windows machines can't talk to each other on a network," or "Setting up a network is rocket science," without even realizing it.

The devices you use on your network is totally up to you. Most designers usually end up with some mix of color and black-and-white printers, a shared Internet connection, and a Mac that acts as a file server, or a common location to store the files for client projects.

In this chapter, we'll take a look at different ways to share files with other designers on your network, figure out how to set up your Mac to talk on a network, and learn what it takes to build a network of your own.