Re: Basic Guide to Scripting Terms?
Re: Basic Guide to Scripting Terms?
- Subject: Re: Basic Guide to Scripting Terms?
- From: pete <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 15:22:52 -0700
Small correction to Michael's otherwise excellent post. Danny Goodman's book
does not cover Finder scripting, as it was released before OS 9 and the
advent of the scriptable Finder. It does, however, cover a lot of OS-level
stuff through scripting additions. I personally use Goodman's book and the
AS in a Nutshell; I find they complement each other quite nicely.
Goodman is an exceptional tutorial/intro, which gives enough background
context so that you actually *understand* a command or technique; its only
fault is being a bit out of date. (And a bit hard to find, too.)
AS in a Nutshell, like Michael said, is not nearly as readable, but it's
incredibly thorough. If you need to write a script and look up various parts
of it, you're likely to do a lot of jumping back and forth to the index with
this one, and you might need to play around with commands a bunch before you
fully understand how to use them. But it's a good concise reference that
will probably be useful long past your "newbie" days.
It sounds like you were looking for a more general programming book, which
sounds like a great idea to me, for the same reasons Michael lists. When you
find one, I'd like to know ;)
- pete -
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Ask yourself what you want to script and go from there. _AS for The
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Internet_ does a lot with scripting web browser and email apps, as well
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as some FMP and a quick dip into QXP and some others. If you're going
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to script Quark, try Shirley Hopkin's books (she posts here
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occasionally, IIRC). If you're scripting the Finder and other OS tools,
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Danny Goodman's book is easier and more comprehensive than the Language
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guide
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The books I've listed here will not assume you know all the basic
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programming and OO concepts, although they will not always give you a
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complete, detailed explanation of them. For that you'd have to look
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specifically for CS, OO design, or programming books.