Teach Yourself AppleScript in 24 Hours

honestpuck contributes this review of Sams Publishing's Teach Yourself AppleScript in 24 Hours, writing "The market for books on AppleScript cannot be a large one, since there never seem to be many volumes in it; usually only one at a time is up to date and worth the money. Now that O'Reilly's AppleScript In A Nutshell is showing its age (and wasn't that great in the first place), and Danny Goodman's book is even older, I was pleased to hear that this volume had come along." Read on for honestpucks' mixed impressions of the book. Teach Yourself AppleScript in 24 Hours author Jesse Feiler pages 432 publisher Sams Publishing rating 7 reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0672325187 summary Not a bad introduction to AppleScript but leaves off far too early.

Teach Yourself Applescript in 24 Hours (TYA) from Sams Publishing is certainly up to date: it covers Applescript under OS 10.2 and the use of AppleScript Studio to build GUI applications using the language. That's its strength. The book's first weakness, though, is that it starts too far down the learning curve in my opinion. The first few chapters of TYA could be read by someone almost totally new to the Macintosh -- they cover such basics as running the scripts installed with the OS and getting new scripts from Apple and installing them. At the same time, they introduce basic AppleScript programming terminology not really required for these sorts of tasks such as suites, classes and commands. This material would have best waited a few chapters. It is not really until 'Hour 6', most of the way through the first part of the book, that it really sorts itself out and gets down to really teaching you AppleScript.

The Basics The book is divided into four parts: 'Getting Started With AppleScript,' which covers using scripts and basic programming concepts; 'Writing Scripts With Script Editor,' which takes you through using the Script Editor, details AppleScript syntax and how to script the Finder and various applications and using AppleScript Dictionaries; 'Working With AppleScript Studio,' which covers building AppleScript-based GUI applications using Project Builder and Interface Builder all the way through to complex applications that can store and retrieve documents; and a final section 'Advanced Scripting,' which covers Script Objects, scripting across a network (including SOAP and XML-RPC), and integrating scripts with the terminal and cron.

Each section is then divided up into chapters designed to be worked through in less than an hour ,with a small number of short exercises at the end. I found that most chapters took me about half an hour before I reached the exercises, which then took ten to fifteen minutes.

As you can see, almost everything you could ask for is touched on in this book. Once over the introductory chapters, I found the book to be well laid out, well structured and well written. I particularly liked Part III on AppleScript Studio; it started easily and worked up to quite an advanced little application explaining everything well along the way.

The Bad There are some things missing, however. Debugging is hardly mentioned (3/4 of one lesson), and debugging is not exactly trivial in AppleScript. I also found no mention of my pet demon with AppleScript; its incredibly strong typing and problems with having data in the wrong type; this is a classic problem with files and file names. In reality, this book teaches you the language without really getting down to teach you how to program in the language. A fine distinction, I know, but after just reading Learning Perl Objects, References & Modules, I found TYA to be light on real examples and real world code. Even the best section, the one on AppleScript Studio, didn't touch on many things you will need to know.

Sams have a page devoted to the book at the Sams web site, but frankly the URL is so long and cumbersome I don't dare risk putting it in a post. Go to the site and type 'AppleScript' in the search box. It has the table of contents and a sample chapter and some of the code from the book. The sample chapter is the third chapter 'Running The Scripts You Already Have' and really doesn't give you a good feel for how the book teaches you AppleScript programming. The page to download the code examples says "All the code developed for the book in one convenient download," but in fact all you get are the AppleScript Studio projects and source from four of the chapters. Oh, and the introduction says "There are even a few goodies on the web site that aren't in the book" -- they sure must be good as I couldn't find them.

In conclusion, I think this book starts too far down the learning curve and leaves off too early, with not enough detail. It seems a shame, what we have here is well laid out and well written, I wanted it to be better after I had finished. This book might suit someone absolutely new to the Mac who wanted to learn enough AppleScript to perform a few basic operations, for everyone else it'll be better to wait till October when AppleScript 1-2-3 will be out from Peachpit and AppleScript: The Definitive Guide will be out from O'Reilly, and we might have a better option. If you absolutely need to get some help with AppleScript Studio then borrow someone else's copy or find one second hand.

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