Ness and Ray offer a comprehensive guide to much that the latest Mac OS X Tiger can do for you. For a company with less than 5% of the desktop market, Apple has still been able to stuff an amazing amount of functionality into Tiger.
Take for instance searching on the Internet. One of the core tasks that everybody does. Apple put together a cute meta-search engine, called Sherlock. If you give it a query, it forwards these to actual search engines like Google, Lycos or AskJeeves, and collects and displays the combined results. In itself, this is quite useful, as you can appreciate. Indeed, there are other meta-search engines that also do this.
Sherlock goes further. As the authors show, it has "channels". Specialised to key areas like pictures, stocks (finance), movies, eBay and flights (travel). These let you search websites with databases in those fields. To be sure, experienced users may not need this. But other, newer users might like this ease of use.
Then for amateur musicians, Tiger has GarageBand. The book explains how it lets you make your own compositions. Easy to use functions that cover much if not all of what you might want to do in your garage. Much cheaper than buying custom software, since it comes bundled into Tiger.
There is much more covered in the book. The above should give you some idea of what's available in Tiger.
