AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

How This Book Is Organized

This book is divided into four sections, as follows.

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, Why to Use AppleScript

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, Where to Use AppleScript

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, Basic Concepts

An explanation of the technologies underlying AppleScript and a glossary of fundamental terms. This is where the technical discussion starts. The rest of the book depends upon the facts and definitions laid down in this chapter.

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 section as a linguistic reference.

Chapter 4, Introducing the Language

A subjective description of what AppleScript is like as a language, just to give you a sense of what you're getting into.

Chapter 5, Syntactic Ground ...