Mac Dr - OS X El Capitan for Dummies : A Wiley Brand

OS X El Capitan For Dummies

Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com

Copyright 2016 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey

Published simultaneously in Canada

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Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952267

ISBN 978-1-119-14961-3 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-14964-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-14963-7 (ebk)

1. Table of Contents

You made the right choice twice: OS X El Capitan (OS X 10.11) and this book. Take a deep breath and get ready to have a rollicking good time. Thats right. This is a computer book, but its fun. What a concept! Whether youre brand spanking new to the Mac or a grizzled Mac vet, I guarantee that reading this book to discover the ins and outs of OS X El Capitan will make everything easier. The publisher couldnt say as much on the cover if it werent true!

This books roots lie with my international best seller Macintosh System 7.5 For Dummies, an award-winning book so good that long-deceased Mac clone-maker Power Computing gave away a copy with every Mac clone it sold. OS X El Capitan For Dummies is the latest revision and has been, once again, completely updated to include all the tasty OS X goodness in El Capitan. In other words, this edition combines all the old, familiar features of previous editions but is once again updated to reflect the latest and greatest offering from Apple as well as feedback from readers.

Why write a For Dummies book about El Capitan? Well, El Capitan is a big, somewhat complicated personal-computer operating system. So I made OS X El Capitan For Dummies a not-so-big, not-too-complicated book that shows you what El Capitan is all about without boring you to tears, confusing you, or poking you with sharp objects.

In fact, I think youll be so darned comfortable that I wanted the title to be OS X El Capitan Made Easy, but the publishers wouldnt let me. Apparently, we For Dummies authors have to follow some rules, and using For Dummies in this books title is one of them.

And speaking of dummies remember, thats just a word. I dont think youre a dummy at all quite the opposite! My second choice for this books title was OS X El Capitan For People Smart Enough to Know They Need This Book, but you can just imagine what Wiley thought of that. (Cmon, thats the whole point of the name! they insisted. Besides, its shorter our way.)

The book is chock-full of information and advice, explaining everything you need to know about OS X in language you can understand along with timesaving tips, tricks, techniques, and step-by-step instructions, all served up in generous quantities.

Another rule we For Dummies authors must follow is that our books cannot exceed a certain number of pages. (Brevity is the soul of wit, and all that.) So I wish I could have included some things that didnt fit. Although I feel confident youll find what you need to know about OS X El Capitan in this book, some things bear further looking into, including these:

• Information about many of the applications (programs) that come with OS X El Capitan: An installation of OS X El Capitan includes roughly 55 applications, mostly located in the Applications folder and the Utilities folder within it. Id love to walk you through each one of them, but that would have required a book a whole lot bigger, heavier, and more expensive than this one.

  I brief you on the handful of bundled applications essential to using OS X El Capitan and keep the focus there namely, Calendar, Contacts, Messages, Mail, Safari, TextEdit, and the like as well as several important utilities you may need to know how to use someday.

• Information about Microsoft Office, Apple lifestyle and productivity apps (iMovie, Numbers, Pages, and so on), Adobe Photoshop, Quicken, and other third-party applications: Okay, if all the gory details of all the bundled (read: free) OS X El Capitan applications dont fit here, I think youll understand why digging into third-party applications that cost extra was out of the question.
• Information about programming for the Mac: This book is about using OS X El Capitan, not writing code for it. Dozens of books most of which are two or three times the size of this book cover programming on the Mac; this one doesnt.