iLife bundles together several Apple applications (iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb, iMovie, and GarageBand) that until now only existed as separate entities. Durdik spent his entire professional life configuring and managing networks of Macintosh computers. His book is a welcome initiative, as there is no official manual from Apple for any of these applications.

The book is organized into parts, and each application is covered in one of these parts. Additional parts include a quick Macintosh primer, for those who are used to different operating systems; the installation and configuration of iLife; and interactions with iTunes and the new Apple virtual environment, iCloud. Each part is in turn divided into several chapters following the same schema: the first chapter describes the overall application environment, and the following chapters describe in detail capabilities, commands, and menus, with the help of diagrams and actual screen shots. This book teaches readers how to use the applications; it is especially targeted at beginners. It does not teach creativity or how to work effectively with multimedia.

Durdik assumes that the reader is familiar with the Apple environment. Although the first chapter is organized as a primer about Mac technology and Appendix A describes how to use iLife on portable Apple devices, the iTunes/iCloud environment is not thoroughly covered. That being said, this book fills a gap: it seems to be the only serious reference about applications that, though extremely powerful and well designed, lack printed documentation.