AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into four sections:

Part I, AppleScript Overview

Part I consists of general introductory material, explaining what AppleScript is, motivating the reader with examples of various ways and means for putting AppleScript to use, and defining fundamental terms that the reader will need to understand.

Chapter 1

Provides some motivational guidelines and real-life examples intended to answer such big existential questions as what AppleScript is good for and why you would want to use it anyway.

Chapter 2

Surveys the various areas of the computer where AppleScript can be employed—for example, by running a script in the Script Editor, by calling into AppleScript from some application’s internal scripting language, or by way of a Unix scripting language like Perl.

Chapter 3

A brief hands-on tutorial or walk-though, illustrating what it’s like to plan and implement a task using AppleScript in real life.

Chapter 4

An explanation of the technologies underlying AppleScript and a glossary of fundamental terms. This is where the technical discussion starts. If you already know something about AppleScript and don’t need to be motivated to use or learn it, you might skim or skip the first three chapters, but you should definitely read this one, since the rest of the book depends upon it.

Part II, The AppleScript Language

Part II develops AppleScript as a programming language. Learners should read the chapters in order; experienced users may employ this ...