October 2002
Beginner to intermediate
728 pages
21h 8m
English
Content preview from Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition
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Installing Mac OS X Programs
In general, new programs arrive on your Mac via one of two avenues: on a CD, or via an Internet download. The CD method is slightly simpler; see “Performing the Installation” later in this section.
For help installing downloaded programs, on the other hand, read on.
.sit, .tar, and .gz
Programs you download from the Internet generally arrive in a specially encoded, compressed form, as shown in Figure 14-18. Study the end of the downloaded file’s name; it usually has one of these file name extensions:
.sit indicates a StuffIt file, the standard Macintosh file-compression format.
.tar is short for tape archive, an ancient Unix utility that combines (but doesn’t compress) several files into a single icon, for simplicity in sending.
.gz is short for gzip, a standard Unix compression format.
.tar.gz or .tgz represents one compressed archive containing several files.
Figure 4-18. Downloading a new program from the Internet may strew your desktop with icons. After the installation is complete, you can delete all of them. (But keep the .dmg file if you think you might want to install the software again later.)
The only thing you need to know about these compression and archiving formats is that StuffIt Expander can turn all of them back into usable form. In fact, StuffIt Expander, a program in your Applications→Utilities folder, generally kicks in automatically when ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.