It's About Time, and It's a Good Book

It's interesting to see just how powerful AppleScript has become. Initially scripting languages were not well suited for general purpose programming because they lacked too many features and/or were too inefficient. Both of these constraints have gone away. Computers are so powerful, the inefficiency doesn't matter. And the languages have gotten enough features that in many cases AppleScript works just fine as a solution to a general programming problem.

It's about time for this book. Up until now the information about AppleScript has been thin. Now this tutorial has been published to explain the use of the language. I like Mr. Kochan's writing style. He starts off having you write a program. If you type it the way he says, the program has a bug in it. (Kind of like my programs.) That way, about the first thing you see is how AppleScript reports an error. With that out of the way, you can move on to learning the language.

It's quite a comprehensive book, talking about things like classes of variables, there's quite a bit on string manipulation. Of course all the usual things like logic, loops, files and so on. He saves the description of AppleScript Studio until the end of the book, that way you learn more about the language itself and are ready when Studio comes in to help make the task so much easier.

Other Reviews

• Lost in translation
• The best book out there for learning Applescript
• A competent, well-written, friendly textbook
• It's About Time, and It's a Good Book
• Good, up-to-date starting point