If you're like us, you like to pick up a book and ruffle through its pages before you buy it. Below you'll find a collection of excerpts from five BeOS Bible chapters. The Filetyping Problem: Both MacOS and Windows suffer from arbitrary and frustrating limitations when it comes to specifying and controlling filetypes. BeOS gets around these limitations with an elegant MIME-typing scheme. Audio Applications: The BeOS is optimized from the ground-up for handling high-bandwidth media, with the highest priority going to audio streams moving through the system. Query Power: Use BeOS's powerful Find panel to data-mine your hard drive in ways simply not possible on other operating systems. Data Translations & Device Preferences: Two excerpts from the Preferences and Customizations chapter. The elegance of object-oriented operating system design becomes readily apparent at the user level with the inclusion of system-wide file format translation support. Users can tell the OS to reserve hardware resources for legacy hardware devices, if necessary. Meet the Terminal: While not necessary for general system operation, power users will appreciate the added power offered by the full bash shell built into BeOS. This chapter is designed to help users who have never used a shell before get up to speed quickly.