Customer Reviews

Danny Goodman's Applescript Handbook, 2nd Edition

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Danny Goodman's absolute treatise on AppleScript. The definitive, must have bible for learning, using, living with AppleScript.

Danny's easy-to-read and insightful tomb. This takes you from absolutely clueless to programming in as little as a month. Danny starts with theory then delivers pratical, real world solutions as examples.

Many books eschew the object oriented underpinnnings of AppleScript, often assuming (wrongly) the customer already knows OOP (Object Oriented Programming). Danny goes through object-oriented programming with outstanding lucidity comprehensible to everyone.

After laying the foundation, Danny dives into addressing the issue by issue in AppleScript including referencing, coercion, looping, optimizations, object-store, and so so much more. The depth of AppleScript is only limited by your imagination.

Many programming books are considered authorities, the last stop, first stop, definitive source everyone turns to. Danny Goodman's _AppleScript Handbook_ is that. If you want to learn AppleScript the right way so your can use it, adapt it, relearn it, and reapply it from application to application, then you *must* own this book.

-Scott

Those familiar with Goodman¹s ³Complete HyperCard Handbook² will feel right at home with this comprehensive look at AppleScript. His style moves beginners through the rough first stages of the learning process with a quick look at the basics of the language and cogent metaphors that help convey the underlying structure of AppleScript. His early chapters are easy to follow, but present the nuts and bolts of the language in a way experienced programmers will appreciate. Perhaps the strongest point of the book is the reference section. Variables, operators, and commands are presented in a well organized way, with all the information on function and format close at hand. It is this section one will flip through again and again in the process of exploring the first few scripts, and the enclosed disk is packed with utilities and samples to get started on.

When I wanted to learn Applescript I bought serveral books, included this one. This book gave me clear insight in the AppleScript mechanisms but also why I should use it. It is been a reference since and I don't travel/develop without it.

I loved Danny Goodman's Complete HyperCard Handbook and have relied on it for years. So when I wanted to learn what is really going on in AppleScript and how to do things with it, I figured I could count on Goodman. I was not disappointed. I had already read the entire reference manual on AppleScript put out by Apple but was still almost clueless as to how to use AppleScript successfully. My beef with most books that purport to teach you how to use a scripting language is that they simply lay out all the elements that you have to work with, along with a few trivial examples, and then leave it up to you to figure out how to put something useful together. Goodman has a real knack for knowing the questions a beginner will have and the types of things a person is likely to want to do using the scripting language. In the first 100 pages, Goodman concisely answered numerous nagging questions and pointed out significant features of AppleScript that had escaped my notice. Even though the book was published way back in 1994, it is still very relevant, as the essentials of AppleScript seem to have changed very little. An extremely helpful book.