The difficulty for the Mac faithful, though, is that nothing could be further removed from the Mac-friendly user interface of the Unix shell environment. There is a learning curve that must be addressed by Mac users who want to get the most out of their new system, and that's where Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther comes into the picture. This is the introductory Unix and shell-script texts adapted to the specificity of the Mac OS X, suitable for someone who has worked with Unix before. Because of the extensive capabilities of Unix shell, the author devotes many pages to show how key commands (like ls and chmod) work in meeting the most common scenario. More useful (because Unix help screens explain the basics well enough alone), they carefully explain the many recipes that solve the problem of meeting all the people - like the fact that many Unix and Mac applications encode the line breaks in text files differently.