We've been busy updating our most popular titles for OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion over the last few months, and if you've been wanting to master Mountain Lion (or finally take control of a previous big cat), you can now get expert assistance at half off. That's right, you can save 50% on all Take Control titles and Macworld Superguides through October 3rd!

This is a great opportunity to ensure that you have top-notch technical content at your fingertips, and to update your collection of Take Control ebooks with a single trip through the cart. And remember, any ebooks you purchase automatically appear in your Take Control account in various formats so you can easily download them any time for reading on your Mac, iPad, iPhone, Kindle, or other device.

Scan the Mountain Lion titles in our catalog and read more about any individual ebook. This coupon code - CPN20921SEPSALE - should appear automatically on the first screen of the cart, along with your discount amount. (Though we certainly hope everything works properly, if our site is overloaded by sale traffic, try again later in the day when things have settled down.)

Not sure what you want? Here's a quick guide to our latest and greatest.

If you're ready to install Mountain Lion and want to be ready for any eventuality, nothing beats Joe Kissell's Take Control of Upgrading to Mountain Lion. This ebook helps you make a suitable backup, explains what to do no matter which version of Mac OS X you are upgrading from, and walks you through key post-installation steps to get off to a smooth start.

Once you've installed Mountain Lion, we have two more essential ebooks for you: Matt Neuburg's Take Control of Using Mountain Lion helps you learn the ropes and customize your Mountain Lion experience, while Joe's Take Control of Apple Mail in Mountain Lion explains Mail's new features in Mountain Lion and how to handle your email efficiently.

And, whether you're running Mountain Lion or not, we have recently updated the following titles to keep pace with changes from Apple and the industry as a whole. (Note that the most recent updates to these books have been free to those who owned previous versions - check your Take Control account if you missed our email alerting you to the updates.)

• Take Control of iCloud, by Joe Kissell: Everything you need to know to get the most out of iCloud's many services and work around problems that might crop up.

• Take Control of Spotlight for Finding Anything on Your Mac, by Sharon Zardetto: Explore Spotlight searching, one of Mac OS X’s least explained features, and stop wasting time looking for your files. (This book isn't new, but we've confirmed that it's accurate for Mountain Lion.)

• Take Control of Maintaining Your Mac, by Joe Kissell: The first of three ebooks in Joe's Mac Fitness trilogy, this ebook helps you keep your Mac running smoothly.

• Take Control of Troubleshooting Your Mac, by Joe Kissell: The second of three ebooks in the Mac Fitness trilogy, this ebook is your go-to guide when you need to diagnose a Mac problem.

• Take Control of Speeding Up Your Mac, by Joe Kissell: The final member of the Mac Fitness trilogy, this ebook discusses how to evaluate your Mac's present performance and explains the many ways you can improve upon it.

• Take Control of Your 802.11n AirPort Network, by Glenn Fleishman: Set up and maintain your AirPort-based Wi-Fi network using AirPort Utility 6 or the iOS AirPort Utility app.

• Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal, by Joe Kissell: Get comfortable with telling your Mac what to do by issuing Unix commands in Terminal.

Don't miss our application-specific titles as well, including Michael E. Cohen's Take Control of TextExpander, which we recently updated to cover Smile's new TextExpander 4, along with Joe Kissell's Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink 2, Kirk McElhearn's Take Control of Scrivener 2, Glenn Fleishman's Take Control of BBEdit, Michael's Take Control of PDFpen 5, and Joe's Take Control of CrashPlan Backups. If you use - or would like to get started with - any of these programs, these ebooks will help you climb the learning curve gracefully. This coupon-loaded link shows you all our app-specific ebooks in the catalog.

Once on the Take Control catalog page, you can click any title (and then click the cover image that appears) to read more about any ebook. To order from the catalog, select as many titles as you want (you can select from more than one category) and then click the Buy Selected Ebooks button to add them all to the cart.

The sale lasts through October 3rd... please pass the word to your friends by forwarding this email message or posting the catalog links to Twitter or Facebook! We really appreciate word-of-mouth recommendations!

Please note that our cart can't combine discounts, so those of you who are TidBITS members (many thanks!) and who receive 30% off every order should instead stick to ordering with the 50%-off links in this message, since it's a better deal.

Thank you for your kind words and continued support of the Take Control series. We're a tiny company, and we couldn't do it without you!

cheers... -Adam & Tonya Engst, Take Control publishers

—Posted by Adam Engst on September 21, 2012