This definitive guide is the first book devoted exclusively to teaching and documenting Userland Frontier, a powerful scripting environment for Web site management and system level scripting. Packed with examples, advice, tricks, and tips, Frontier: The Definitive Guide teaches you Frontier from the ground up. Learn how to automate repetitive processes, control remote computers across a network, beef up your Web site by generating hundreds of related Web pages automatically, and more. Whether you're a complete Frontier beginner or an experienced hand in need of a clear, ordered reference, you'll find what you need to make the most of Frontier. Even if you've never programmed before, you'll be cranking out Web pages or writing your own custom scripts in no time, joining the ranks of thousands of Macintosh power users who make Frontier their "home base." (Covers Frontier 4.2.3 for the Macintosh.) This book covers Frontier's:
- Simple but sophisticated multithreaded scripting language (UserTalk) and its elegant debugging environment
- Integrated database with instant access to data, text, outlines, and tables
- Totally automated environment, where scripts can create dialogs, open windows, edit text, alter menus
- Ability to hook into the system and to read and write files, open documents, and read the clipboard
- Capacity for sending and receiving Apple events, so it can drive any scriptable application and be integrated into other scripting applications
- Network capability to function as a client or server over AppleTalk or the Internet
About the Author
Matt Neuburg started programming computers in 1968, when he was 14 years old, as a member of a literally underground high school club that met once a week to do timesharing on a bank of PDP-10s by way of primitive teletype machines. He also occasionally used Princeton University's IBM-360/67, but gave it up in frustration when one day he dropped his punch cards. He majored in Greek at Swarthmore College, and received his Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1981, writing his doctoral dissertation (about Aeschylus) on a mainframe. He proceeded to teach classical languages, literature, and culture at many well-known institutions of higher learning and to publish numerous scholarly articles unlikely to interest anyone. Meanwhile, he obtained an Apple IIc and became hopelessly hooked on computers again, migrating to a Macintosh in 1990. He wrote some educational and utility freeware, became an early regular contributor to the online journal TidBITS, and in 1995 left academe to edit MacTech Magazine. In August 1996 he became a freelancer.
