Conventions Used in This Book

The screenshots (and their accompanying descriptions) in this book are mainly from Mac OS X 10.3, also known as Panther. In most cases, you'll find that the descriptions will still work fine for Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar).

This book uses the following abbreviations:

Hz, kHz, MHz, and GHz: Hertz (cycles per second), kilohertz (one thousand hertz), megahertz (one million hertz), and gigahertz (one billion, or 10⁹ hertz)
bps, kbps, Mbps: Bits per second, kilobits (1024 bits) per second, and megabits (1,048,576 bits) per second
KB/s, MB/s: Kilobytes (1024 bytes) per second and megabytes (1,048.576 bytes) per second

This book uses the following typographic conventions:

Constant width: Constant width is used for listing the output of command-line utilities.
Italic: Italic is used for emphasis, for first use of a technical term, and for example URLs.
...: Ellipses indicate text that has been omitted for clarity.