Yes, it's true -- most authors have very little say in the titles of their books. As evidence, I introduce the image at left :). Let's just say that O'Reilly and I had a disagreement over the new branding strategy for the book, and that in the end, we agreed to disagree (insert "Don't judge a book by its cover" joke here). As such, the official title of the new book, as seen at left, is "Mac OS X Power Hound Panther Edition." According to O'Reilly, it should be available in various bookstores today, and it's also listed at Amazon, though they don't show it as currently shipping. And yes, it's now part of a "family," as you'll also see a "Windows XP Power Hound." For the record, I had absolutely nothing to do with that book...
For those who haven't been around here very long, this book is basically a "best of Mac OS X Hints." The first book, Mac OS X Hints Jaguar Edition (what a nice simple name!) came out in 2003, with about 550 hints in it. The new book had to drop some non-Panther-applicable hints (label hints? who needs 'em!), but we also added probably 175 new hints, so there are now something like 680 hints in the new edition -- all for the same list price as the first edition. The book is not simply a republication of the hints from the site (but every hint in the book does appear on the site, somewhere). Every hint is written from scratch, with added detail and screenshots (over 400 of them), and then tested and proofed by multiple people -- which means, of course, that there are still errors in the text :).
Read on for more about the book and its production ... as well as an explanatory note for the (probably inevitable) "Hey, that's not fair -- you're getting rich on the work of others!" comments that may appear here...
I'll start by saying that if you read the site every day, then you really don't "need" the book. As stated above, there are no new hints in the book that you can't find here. The book is much better organized than is the site, making it easier to find the relevant hints. But this book is really targeted at those who don't visit every day, and want to get the most out of their OS X machines. However, if you feel like supporting my efforts and the site by purchasing a copy, I certainly won't stop you :) (if you use this Amazon link, I'll make a bit for the referral, too)
About "Getting rich on the work of others!" comments:
If you're going to post a comment along these lines, please read this section first. The first observation is that nobody gets rich (with maybe one or two notable exceptions) writing Mac books. To give you some sense of the market, both of the figures in the following quote greatly exceed what a typical "junior" author such as myself might make on a single Mac book over the course of a year: "According to the 2000 census, for example, the median income of an American man with a college degree was about $52,200, 60 percent higher than the $31,600 for those with a high school degree." (source: NY Times, August 10, 2004). Making a decent living as a Mac author requires more than one book a year, and certainly more than a book every 1.5 years, which is my current rate :).
Second, it's important to note that anyone can do what I just did. Really. The macosxhints.com database is fully searchable. And though the specific language and code snippets within the system are copyright of the original poster (with a granted license to use by macosxhints.com), the knowledge contained in those hints cannot be copyrighted: there is no copyright on the knowledge that dragging a file onto the Mail icon on the dock will open a new message with an attachment. Even though I have a granted right to use the actual language published here, you'll find that there is basically none of it used in the book. I wrote everything from scratch, as the target audience and delivery media are entirely different. Anyone else could do exactly the same if they took the time and made the effort; they just can't use writing verbatim that they do not have the rights to use.
OK, with that out of the way ... I thought, going in, that publishing an update to the book would be much easier than was writing the whole book the first time. In some ways, it was easier (chapter layouts were done, and I obviously had the full text of the first booK). However, in many ways it was harder -- Panther changed just enough stuff that nearly every hint had to be tweaked in some way. In addition, I had to re-shoot every single screenshot, as Apple changed the appearance of the interface, and on the Unix front, tcsh was replaced by bash. So it was a complicated process, and I spent roughly the same amount of time on it as I did on the first book, just on different tasks.
While the writing in this book is mine, the book itself wouldn't exist without the efforts of David Pogue, Adam Goldstein, and Kirk McElhearn, who singlehandedly tackled the rewrite of both Unix chapters -- and though he's an experienced bash user, I'm sure he was tired of Apple's tcsh-to-bash migration by the time he was done editing and writing! In addition, there's a huge production team behind the scenes who turn a simple Word document and 400 screenshots into the final production that is a published book. They are the true magicians in this process; my hat is off to the production team for another first-class effort!
So thanks to everyone that helped turn the concept into the reality of a second book, and a big thank you to those who bought the first book. Clearly, without your support, there would not have been a second book.
-rob.

