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Apple Training Series: AppleScript 1-2-3
- By Sal Soghoian, Bill Cheeseman
- Published Dec 19, 2008 by Peachpit Press. Part of the Apple Training series.
- Copyright 2009
- Dimensions: 7-3/8 X 9-1/8
- Pages: 896
- Edition: 1st
- Book
- ISBN-10: 0-321-14931-9
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-14931-2
- eBook (Watermarked)
- ISBN-10: 0-321-49618-3
- ISBN-13: 978-0-321-49618-8
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Product Author Bios
Sal Soghoian discovered AppleScript in 1992 while looking for ways to automate publishing-related tasks at his service bureau. Since that time, he has remained a tireless evangelist for AppleScript and has served as the product manager for automation technologies at Apple for more than eleven years. His yearly all-day AppleScript training sessions at Macworld Expo are legendary and their common-sense hands-on approach is captured in this book.
Bill Cheeseman lives in Quechee, Vermont. He is well known in the AppleScript community as originator and long-time Webmaster of The AppleScript Sourcebook Web site and as the developer of two popular AppleScript utilities, PreFab UI Browser and PreFab UI Actions. He is also the author of Cocoa Recipes for Mac OS X: The Vermont Recipes, one of the first books about creating Cocoa applications for Mac OS X. When he isn’t writing software for Macintosh computers, Bill practices law as a civil litigator and trial lawyer.
We know what you’re thinking. You’ve heard about AppleScript. You’ve heard that it can do amazing things. You’ve heard that it can automate away the tiring, redundant, repetitive tasks you do with the computer.
All true. But you’re not sure about what’s involved with using it. Is it difficult? Is it programming? After all, you’re just a better-than average computer user. You know what you know, and your expertise serves you pretty well. But recently you’ve reached the point of asking yourself “Is there a better way?” The answer is “Yes.”
And relax, you just got lucky. This book is for you.
If you’ve never written a single line of computer code—this book is for you. If the most technical thing you do on the computer is calculate a column in Excel—this book is for you. If you’re tired of doing the same thing over and over—this book is for you.
It’s about being motivated to explore, understand, and take advantage of the tools you already own. AppleScript is free—the only price for its use is your desire to finally sit down and take a few moments to absorb and activate its magic.
This book starts at square one and walks you through the process of understanding and writing AppleScript—step by step, one concept at a time—until you find yourself suddenly creating powerful and useful automated solutions. And the lessons in this book are based on a decade of experience teaching hands-on classes to folks just like you. You can do this. You can become Master of your Computer Universe!
Still don’t believe us? Open the first chapter and start reading. You’ll see.
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62 of 64 people found the following review helpful
Gil Poulsen's MyMac.com Review, By
This review is from: Apple Training Series: AppleScript 1-2-3 (Paperback)
"Can you build us an AppleScript to do that?"That question has been put to me dozens of times over my ten-plus years doing Macintosh support, and in almost every instance, the answer has been "yes." AppleScript has literally helped me to earn my living, in the sense that I've been hired to build customized applications that--to name just a few--scan the entire content of a weekly newspaper and flag any prohibited words for later exclusion, pull records from a database and turn them into a fully-formatted 32-page pamphlet of health-specific Web sites, and convert the SGML-tagged text from a medical journal into XPress Tags coding for import into QuarkXPress. I first got turned on to AppleScript at a Macworld Expo back in the 1990s, when I attended a presentation given by a very enthusiastic service bureau employee by the name of Sal Soghoian. Not a programmer by trade, Sal had discovered the joys of AppleScripting while trying to free himself from some of the... Read more
23 of 24 people found the following review helpful
Excellent AppleScript Book, By Keith (LA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Apple Training Series: AppleScript 1-2-3 (Paperback)
I bought the book and received it from Amazon. I personally have been waiting a long time and am glad to see it is finally released. Overall the best and largest book available on the topic. If you have ever attended one of Sal's standing room only AppleScript classes (I have) the book is structured as he describes in the forward. He took his classes and put them in print. He starts off with the basics and quickly moves into more complex examples. If you know AppleScript the first chapter may move slow for you, but you can easily jump ahead. Best $31 you can spend if you are interested in learning AppleScript and don't have lots of time. Disregard the one star review. Don't pan the book because Amazon has a weak "Look Inside" you don't like. You can give Amazon one star in other places.
26 of 29 people found the following review helpful
Good book for intermediate users, By
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Apple Training Series: AppleScript 1-2-3 (Paperback)
I'm a little over three quarters of a way through the book, and I'm finding it very useful. However, I would not recommend this book for beginners. A better option for those completely new to AppleScript is AppleScript: The Missing ManualThis book (AppleScript: 123) is useful for when you're ready to take Apple scripting to the next level. While there are practical scripts that you can copy and apply, the authors focus more on trying to get you to understand the various logic, tools, and language for scripting automations and commands. Depending on your level of expertise with AppleScript, you may have to work through this book cover to cover in order to get a full understanding of scripting language. What I find a little annoying about the book though is its weight and size. Parts of the 900 page book are needlessly... Read more |
Online Sample Chapter
Errata
Lesson 1 - The First Step
Page 14, second paragraph following script 1.6:
Change "edit it by deleting 'the startup disk' and entering in its place 'home'" to "edit it by deleting 'get the index of Finder window "Macintosh HD"' and entering in its place 'open home'.
Page 19, script 1.12:
Change the text of script 1.12 to 'tell application "Finder" to get the target of the front Finder window'", matching Figure 1.8.
Lesson 3 - Identifying Objects
Page 146, first paragraph:
Add "(These scripts are provided to illustrate the point, but they will not compile as shown. To compile Script 3.3, for example, remove 'of application "QuickTime Player"' and enclose the statement in a 'tell application "Quicktime Player"' block.)"
Lesson 6 - Information Tools
script 6.22:
Change the capitalization of script 6.22 so that the last word is '"TextEdit"'.
Lesson 7 - Actions with Items
script 7.20:
Change line 17 of script 7.20 to 'set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""}'
Lesson 9 - Communicating with the User
script 9.63:
Change line 17 of script 9.63 to 'display dialog "File \"" & item_name & "\" is not the correct type."
Lesson 18 - working with Lists and Records
script 18.1:
Change the last line of script 18.1 to '--> returns: text'.
Lesson 22
Page 650: second-to-last line of code should read "DIMENSIONS", not "DIMEMSIONS"
Page 672: "calcluate" should be "calculate"
Lesson 24
Page 714: "returns the current hour as string:" should be "returns the current seconds as string:"
Lesson 25 - Unit Coercions
script 25.26:
Change the last line of script 25.26 to '--> returns: miles 1.242742384475
Lesson 27 - Connecting to Network Servers
script 27.17:
Change the script to 'mount volume "smb://
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