Excited by Apple’s public beta of OS X Yosemite? Assuming that you’re among the one million public beta testers, you can now explore Yosemite to your heart’s content. But the rewards of beta testing come with both risks and responsibilities, so in this book, author Joe Kissell shares his years of experience with the betas of every version of OS X since 10.3 Panther, ensuring that you won’t waste time or mess up anything important.
He teaches you what’s involved with beta testing in general, and discusses the pros and cons of installing the beta on a startup volume, virtual machine, separate volume, SuperDuper sandbox, or (best of all) a separate Mac. Next up, you’ll run the installer (without letting it delete itself). With installation completed, Joe suggests key post-installation tasks and categories of software you may need to reinstall, plus gives tips on how to look for new features and report any bugs you may find.
Perhaps most important, Joe explains how to switch between the beta and your main installation of OS X, how to downgrade from Yosemite if necessary, and how to upgrade to the release version when that ships.
In keeping with the fast and fluid nature of beta testing, we’ve decided to publish this ebook exclusively via Leanpub, which was designed for quick releases. Had we used our traditional method, we wouldn’t have been able to publish the book at the same time as the public beta, and we would need more time to react to new versions. Any updates to the book will be free.
We’ve set a suggested price of $5, but you can pay whatever you think it’s worth — whether that’s more or less than the suggested price, or even nothing at all. (And if you get it for free and later decide it was valuable to you, you can come back and buy a copy.) Paying helps Joe and his wife keep their baby in diapers and gives us concrete feedback that books of this sort are worth doing.
When you buy Take Control of Beta Testing Yosemite from Leanpub, you can download PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket versions; these will look and work much like those for any standard Take Control title except that you’ll access them and get updates from the Leanpub system rather than the Take Control Web site.
About Joe Kissell
Take Control publisher Joe Kissell has written more than 60 books about technology, including many popular Take Control books. He formerly wrote for publications such as Macworld, Wirecutter, and TidBITS. He lives in Saskatoon with his wife, his two children, and his cat.
