Re: Short course
Re: Short course
- Subject: Re: Short course
- From: Bill Briggs <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2003 06:06:15 -0400
One thing I'd advise you to do is clearly state the purpose of the
talk right up front. This may sound silly to say, but specifically
tell the attendees that they will NOT, repeat NOT, leave the room
after two hours knowing how to script. They will know how to get
started, they will have seen some of the possibilities and potentials
of AppleScript, they will have a vague feel for a few things, but
scripters they will not be.
While that may seem obvious to us, I've received it as criticism in
the past. As recently as Macworld San Francisco 2003 I gave the
Introduction to AppleScript session and one comment from a feedback
form was "Didn't meet my objecctive of learning to script." This
after I had explicitly stated up front that anyone who expected to be
able to script things after an hour and 15 minutes was delusional.
For some reason, people with no scripting or programming experience
expect that they will "learn it" in such a short talk. Of course
they're hopelessly wrong, but they are upset when the expectation to
make them into a scripter is not met. Be forewarned.
Your list of topics looks okay, but you'll only have time for a
cursory treatment of things. If you've never done one of these before
you'll be surprised at how fast the two hours races past. If you're
taking questions as you go be sure to keep off of long side roads or
you'll never get through your agenda in the allotted time.
Good luck with the talk and I hope you manage to convince many people
to become new scripters.
- web
At 9:12 PM +1300 04/03/03, David Hood wrote:
With luck, in the nearish future, I may be doing a 2 hour
introductory course for Applescript on our campus. The idea will be
to give people who haven't used it a start, with a target audience
being those people doing repetitive tasks on a Mac.
Below is a list of what I thought would be useful topics to bring
into an introductory course. I thought I'd just ask this list if
anyone has anything they would really liked to have explained when
starting scripting.
Topics:
The core language - what it looks like, functions, loops
Script Resources - ASLG, editors, Script Menu etc
Scripting extensions- what they are, where they go
Using dictionaries - what they are, how you use them, standard additions
Controlling applications - tell something to do something
Controlling Files - scripting the Finder, moving files on the basis
of criteria
Saving scripts as applications - droplets and stay open scripts, idle
Scripting in Mac OS X - do shell script, mentioning gui scripting is
a coming thing.
Regards,
David Hood
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