Chapter 6: Getting Help within OS X
In This Chapter
Understanding the Help Center
Navigating the Help Center
Getting help inside an application
Understanding help tags
Working with command-line help
Exploring other avenues of help
As you explore OS X, you will increasingly come across new and exciting areas of the operating system. OS X is a huge, and complex, operating system and—despite its intuitive nature—sooner or later everybody needs help. When you come across unfamiliar territory, OS X offers several methods of built-in assistance.
The main method of reading help files is through OS X's built-in Help Center. The Help Center provides explanations for most basic tasks, as well as documentation relating to OS X. You can use it to learn basic features about OS X and discover how to use basic hardware, and it acts as a showcase for new features found in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.
Another type of assistance offered by OS X is help tags. These yellow labels appear when the pointer is positioned over various onscreen elements and offer further explanation as to what function the element provides. You may know them better by the name popularized in Microsoft Office: Tool Tips.
A further help service is available via man (short for manual) pages in Terminal. These pages outline the Unix command-line tasks used in the Terminal application.
In addition to the OS X help system, many applications provide their own help sections. Furthermore, you can use the Internet as a resource. Apple ...
