Re: newbie question: define a variable?
Re: newbie question: define a variable?
- Subject: Re: newbie question: define a variable?
- From: has <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2001 11:00:33 +0000
Paul Berkowitz wrote:
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On 12/29/01 6:22 AM, "has" <email@hidden> wrote:
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> Oh, and not forgetting reference materials:
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Very nice succinct description of AppleScript behavior, has.
Cool... I'm practising for when I write my book.;)
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The link is on Apple's AppleScript webpage, where he'll find much else too.
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For people coming from other a background in other programming languages,
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the O'Reilly's book "AppleScript in a Nutshell" is probably the best
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documentation as it is quite complete, "translates" AS terms to for "other
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language" types, and is almost up-to-date: AS 1.6 including OS 10.0.x.
I've not seen the O'Reilly book on the bookshelves so haven't had a chance
to browse it. Does it do much by way of covering "real" programming methods
in AS? The books I have flicked through (don't recall which), seemed to
focus on the simpler 'applied' aspects of using AS, e.g. how to control
applications. I'm starting to do some OOP with AS, and I reckon I've
learned at least as much by grokking documentation for other languages than
I have from reading AS-based stuff. Is there any serious reading material
available for this kind of stuff, or do you have to just figure it out for
yourself once you hit a certain level?
Likewise, designing efficient AS code seems to be as much experimentation,
testing and intuitive guesswork as anything. (e.g. The tricks I used in my
strftimeLib where I bung all my handlers into a list and access by index is
much faster than using a really long if...elseif...elseif... statement, but
I went and figured it out all by myself.) Plus I'm still struggling to
figure out how to do efficiency calculations (big-O stuff and that). Are
there any AS books cover this aspect of AS programming in any detail?
I confess I found initially getting to grips with AS to be pretty darn
easy, not to mention painless (previously, I'd done a bit of BASIC circa
1985 on an 8-bit home micro, but from then until I discovered AS, nada).
But going from foot-in-door stage to full-fledged code wizard seems to be
taking much longer, and with rather more ugly bumps than I'd have expected.
I almost bought a real book about real OOP yesterday, but it was 25 quid
(I'd just blown 50 on videos in the sales<g>) and with all the examples in
Java it would've been a fair bit of work to translate it all to
AppleScript-think. Though I may yet break.
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> Here's a tutorial that I rather like:
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> http://www.mindspring.com/~i_automate/ It's got plenty good information in
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> very simple, concise form.
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I went to see what that might be, and found it dead.
Aw drat. <sigh> Well, I didn't check it before posting; I just grabbed it
from my links list. [deletes] I do have an IE5 archive of it though if
anyone is desparate for a look (356K).
has