Great Price "AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition" for $20.00 Today
No, don't start with "AppleScript: The Definitive Guide." Although I was highly motivated, diligent, and intelligent (if I may say so), Neuburg's exigent, articulate, and idiosyncratic "guide" defeated me, and I had to buy and work all the exercises in another book (Kochan's "Beginning Applescript") to obtain the background needed to appreciate this one.
The highly praised chapter in the first edition about conquering FrameMaker has been moved to an Appendix in the 2nd Edition, but since Neuberg sends the reader there on page 75, it is still useful and timely. It would have been more useful had he chosen a scriptable application that is on every Macintosh, or one, at least, that is shipped with Tiger, so that readers could follow his adventure rather than simply read about it. The worst that would have happened is that a newer modification of the application might have come out, in which case, as with FrameMaker, the reader could read about, but not experience, the process.
'Introductory' books in the liberal arts ("The Discarded Image" by C.S. Lewis comes to mind) are larded with quotations in Greek, Latin, French, and German, not to mention others. In exactly the same spirit, Neuburg shifts shamelessly from AppleScript to Perl, especially, but also to Unix, Objective-C, Python, and JavaScript, not to mention others. If you can't follow such examples -- he tells you that is all right -- you get the point that AppleScript is compatible with these and more, and he has the chutzpah to mention his own JavaScript book if that is your deficiency.
The effectiveness of good programming books diminishes as you move away from the computer. Programming is learnt at the keyboard, not in the lecture hall. That said, this book has an astonishing amount to offer to someone perusing it in an easy chair and mulling things over, rather than trying a succession of incorrect guesses at the keyboard. Kochan's book taught me, quickly and easily, how to move a Finder window around the screen, but when I decided that the window I wanted to move was the one holding the AppleScript program, Kochan left me without a clue. The "Oh, yeah" that finally got it moving occurred to me over a sausage biscuit in a fast food place with Neuburg's book in front of me. He didn't tell me what to do, but his dictionary exposition got me to where I could figure it out for myself.
As other reviewers have pointed out, Neuburg's emphases are upon the obscure, the contradictory, and the difficult. To explain these, he has not bothered with the obvious, the consistent, and the easy. They do not interest him, and he pays us the high (too high) compliment of implying that the obvious, the easy, and the consistent need not be explained at all.
If you wish to learn AppleScript and must learn it on your own, begin with a book (Kochan's, for example) that will make you reasonably competent in a hurry (three months, in my case). Then, when you have discovered that AppleScript is not as easy as you thought, you are ready for Neuburg to confirm your worst suspicions about its intricacies, devastate your casual assumptions about obvious solutions, and give you pride in beginning to learn AppleScript.
If you buy this book, you must read it several times, or you will not learn much of what it has to say.
AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition Features
- ISBN13: 9780596102111
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Rating :
Price : $39.99
Offer Price : $20.00
AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition Overviews
Mac users everywhere--even those who know nothing about programming--are discovering the value of the latest version of AppleScript, Apple's vastly improved scripting language for Mac OS X Tiger. And with this new edition of the top-selling AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, anyone, regardless of your level of experience, can learn to use AppleScript to make your Mac time more efficient and more enjoyable by automating repetitive tasks, customizing applications, and even controlling complex workflows.
Fully revised and updated--and with more and better examples than ever--AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition explores AppleScript 1.10 from the ground up. You will learn how AppleScript works and how to use it in a variety of contexts: in everyday scripts to process automation, in CGI scripts for developing applications in Cocoa, or in combination with other scripting languages like Perl and Ruby.
AppleScript has shipped with every Mac since System 7 in 1991, and its ease of use and English-friendly dialect are highly appealing to most Mac fans. Novices, developers, and everyone in between who wants to know how, where, and why to use AppleScript will find AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition to be the most complete source on the subject available. It's as perfect for beginners who want to write their first script as it is for experienced users who need a definitive reference close at hand.
AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition begins with a relevant and useful AppleScript overview and then gets quickly to the language itself; when you have a good handle on that, you get to see AppleScript in action, and learn how to put it into action for you. An entirely new chapter shows developers how to make your Mac applications scriptable, and how to give them that Mac OS X look and feel with AppleScript Studio. Thorough appendixes deliver additional tools and resources you won't find anywhere else. Reviewed and approved by Apple, this indispensable guide carries the ADC (Apple Developer Connection) logo.
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Customer Review
Written more as a narrative than a technical book - H. Bruce - Dallas
First, I will state that I am a hands-on software development professional with thirty years' experience. So I have a little background on which to base my opinion. The style of this book makes it nearly impossible to produce answers to the practical questions that I have. The text dances all around any definitive answers, forcing the reader to intently analyze the information provided so that a practical solution can be formed. Clearly, the editor did not stop the author from continuing down the path of writing a book for those who are already quite familiar with applescript. If you are already an applescript programmer, this book might be of use. If you are attempting to learn by example and concept as I am, look elsewhere for explicit information. I will say that this book is an anomaly so far as O'Reilly books go as I generally find them to be quite excellent.
Pretty Good Book about a Problematical Language - John Hevelin - San Francisco Bay Area, CA, USA
I'm a big fan of scripting languages -- I've been scripting the UNIX shells since 1978, and I've done a lot of work with Perl since the early 1990s. About two years ago, I bought an iMac running MAC OS X Tiger, and have been delighted with the machine and the software bundled with it (which includes Perl, Python, PHP, Tcl, bash, and tcsh). I thought I'd take a stab at learning AppleScript in order to extend my knowledge of my new machine and "Apple's way of doing things." By and large, I like O'Reilly publications, so I picked up the second edition of Neuburg's book. I'm quite knowledgeable about operating systems and programming languages, and have designed and built several non-trivial applications.
The good news is that Mr. Neuburg seems highly knowledgeable about AppleScript and does an excellent job of communicating its bugs, design limitations, and other shortcomings. The bad news is that I have no intention of wasting my time trying to learn such a flawed tool. This should not be interpreted as a failing of Mr. Neuburg's book -- I am grateful to him for communicating so clearly the problems with AppleScript, and I owe him a debt of gratitude for saving me a lot of time. I had been considering doing some work with Automater, but I think I'll stick with cron(1) scripts.
The most salient section of Mr. Neuburg's book is Appendix A, a sort of case study of using AppleScript to rename illustration files used in the FrameMaker files of a book by chapter number and sequence number within each chapter. Mr. Neuburg says that this was a requirement of his publisher. As someone who has worked with scholarly and technical publications for most of my professional life, I can state emphatically that any publisher who embeds chapter-sequence data in filenames is making headaches for himself, but I suppose O'Reilly has their own way of doing things. The AppleScript process described by Mr. Neuburg looks like it must have taken hours, if not days, to develop. Having been faced with a similar problem for various FrameMaker projects, I can only compare Mr. Neuburg's AppleScript experience with my homebrow process, which was roughly as follows:
* convert the binary FrameMaker files to MIF with fmbatch
* extract the illustration names with egrep(1)
* create target filenames from the original filenames using awk(1)
* rename the illustration files using a shell script, possibly generated with awk(1)
* insert the revised illustration names into the MIF files with sed(1)
* compare the old MIF files with the new ones with diff(1) to make sure the proper changes were made
This process takes about fifteen minutes. And even for someone not familiar with the individual UNIX tools, the documentation is straightforward, and the tools, once learned, can be used in an infinite number of applications. Given the uncertainty about when or how AppleScript can (or can not) be used in any context, I'll stick with tools that have proven their worth.
Related to Items You've Viewed
- Apple Training Series: AppleScript 1-2-3
- Automator for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard: Visual QuickStart Guide
- AppleScript: The Missing Manual
- AppleScript: The Comprehensive Guide to Scripting and Automation on Mac OS X, Second Edition
- Beginning AppleScript (Programmer to Programmer)
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