Big Book of Apple Hacks Reviewed (Twice), Five Stars all Around!

The problem with book reviews if you’re an author is that if you believe the good ones you also have to believe the bad ones. I promised myself that if I did the best job I could on The Big Book of Apple Hacks I'd ignore the reviews and just be secure in the knowledge that I did the best job I could.

That is great philosophy and all but most of us (at least I couldn't) can't help but sneak a peek at the reviews and when the reviews are positive it makes you feel pretty good. So take a gander at two reviews for The Big Book of Apple Hacks.

From a contributor, Bakari Chavanu:

"Dude, you want to be in control your Mac, rather than it controlling you."

Which nicely encapsulates what I was trying to do with this book.

From Anthony Lawrence, a really great person I've never met:

"I'd have to say that so far, this is my choice for "Best Book of the Year" in the geekish genre. You want this book if you own a Mac. Really. Click the link below now while you are thinking about it. You won't be sorry."

I'd also like to give a shout out to two of the most productive contributors who didn't get listed in the credits section. Their info will be updated in the next printing but I feel terrible that they were somehow omitted from the credits section. I feel particularly bad because both of the omitted contributors put a great deal of effort into the project and made the book a lot better than it would have been with them. In alphabetical order:

David Chartier (you'll also know him from Ars Technica)

As a recent college graduate specializing in multimedia in Denver, CO, David Chartier has his hands in the design, web and Apple industries. After his first IBM PC in high-school got him hooked, Dave hit the ground running - tinkering with just about everything you can do with and to a computer. After getting into design school and catching the Apple bug in 2001, Dave's obsessions focused on what's coming next in the worlds of graphic, video and web design. On the rare occasion Dave is without his MacBook Pro, you'll probably find him either on his snowboard in Breckenridge or a local bike trail.

David wrote, among others, the Launch Differently and Browser Agnosticism hacks. He did an outstanding job and answered a lot of annoying question of mine throughout the process.

The second shout out is to Apple Matters own Devanshu Mehta. His bio:

Devanshu Mehta is a network research engineer and lives with his wife Shanu in the Boston area. He writes for a variety of online publications including Apple Matters.

Devanshu contributed a plethora of great hacks among them the excellent Fun with MacFuse and one of the editors favorites: Image Management with ImageMagick. He also gets extra kudos for answering plenty of my questions.

Deepest Apologies from me to both of those excellent contributors. I also have to apologize to Hadley. Turns out I left his name off the end of his hack (Suck Windows onto Your Mac). I think Hadley's name was left off when we deleted the hack about providing full Wi-Fi coverage for a 57,000 square foot mansion (also by Hadley).

All I can say is things were really hectic as the book was wrapping up and I feel badly about the omissions. I think Devanshu and David will forgive me, Hadley I'm not so sure about. But that guy rolls with a blackberry and an iPhone because the iPhone doesn't get coverage in the squash court and the blackberry has frequent drop outs on his private polo field.

So how about a quick contest to cap things off? Maybe you'd like a copy of The Big Book of Apple Hacks but you'd like one for free. I've got you covered, leave a comment in the next 24 hours and I'll randomly pick a winner. Contest closes Tuesday at 11:00 PM Eastern time. You can only enter once and so forth. Basic Apple Matters rules apply.