Matt Neuburg

I have used UNIX daily since 1978, and have been happily using an iMac running MAC OS X for almost two years. I've done a lot of scripting with the UNIX shells and Perl, so I was curious about what AppleScript might have to offer on the iMac. The good news about this book is that author seems quite knowledgeable about AppleScript. The bad news is that the language seems so buggy and so poorly designed and implemented that there doesn't seem to be much point in learning it. The author never show more really presents a compelling reason for why this language would be useful despite its shortcomings. In Appendix A, the author provides a case study of using AppleScript to rename the book's FrameMaker illustration files to conform to his publisher's requirements. The experience looks painful. I performed a similar task with FrameMaker in a matter of minutes using the UNIX sed(1) and csh(1) utilities on Frame's MIF format. Kudos to the author for writing this book -- it saved me from wasting a lot of time learning AppleScript. show less

This is one of the least helpful programming books I've ever read. Usually, by the end of chapter 1 of a programming book you can write a few functional lines. By the time I finished this book, I still hadn't learned how to do anything truly useful. His examples are redundant, as he repeatedly shows ways to print "howdy" to the screen, but doesn't delve into the programs I would have preferred to learn about, such as iTunes.

A great reference.