Software developers working with the Max OS X operating system have at their disposal a variety of high-quality programming languages and environments. Among these, the environment designed for application scripting deserves special attention. Conceptually, this environment consists of three components: open scripting architecture (OSA), an overall architecture that allows applications to manipulate and execute scripts; AppleScript, a simple but powerful and extensible object-oriented scripting language; and the objects and commands that various applications make available to AppleScript.
By design, AppleScript is exceptionally easy to read and understand, so that occasional programmers can read and write scripts to automate repetitive tasks without having to master all of the details of a full-blown systems programming language. Of course, professional programmers can also use AppleScript to build highly sophisticated and powerful scripts that manipulate different applications through a single programming language.
Normally, the term “AppleScript” refers to the core language, application commands and objects, and user extensions. In addition, separate from AppleScript, but in essence an integral component of it, is AppleScript Editor, a graphical user interface used to write and compile scripts and to browse the object models of the various applications. This is the physical environment that most of this book covers.
Mac OS X version 10.6 (known as Snow Leopard) introduced AppleScriptObjC, a new framework that allows Cocoa applications with graphical interfaces to be written in any combination of AppleScript and Objective-C. This book introduces AppleScriptObjC in the last chapter. It does not cover AppleScript Studio, an application development tool that was superseded by AppleScriptObjC.
Learn AppleScript is a large book, at over 1,000 pages. It mentions OSA only in passing, but, as indicated in the subtitle, this book is comprehensive; it concentrates on explaining how to automate tasks that otherwise would be performed through mouse clicks and navigation through multiple screens or shell commands. The book contains 30 chapters grouped into three parts: Part 1, “Welcome to AppleScript” (chapters 1 through 3); Part 2, “Understanding AppleScript” (chapters 4 through 19); and Part 3, “Putting AppleScript to Work” (chapters 20 through 30).
Most of the book deals with learning AppleScript and using it to manipulate applications and products running under Mac OS X, including files, graphical interfaces, and the Unix command line. This is the material that a reader who wants to become an AppleScript expert would need. In addition, as already mentioned, the last chapter deals with AppleScriptObjC, and chapter 28 introduces Smile, a sophisticated integrated programming environment that uses AppleScript to control a variety of components that programmers can use to develop advanced industrial applications. Smile is a product of Satimage, a French company. The content covers virtually all of the bases that anyone might need, at present, to take AppleScript as far as one would wish.
The book is for a variety of audiences: complete beginners, those with prior AppleScript experience, and programmers who are experienced in other languages. A reader who is patient enough to go through the entire book from beginning to end could, in theory, metamorphose from a complete novice into an expert. In practice, most readers will need to read selectively. Being concise is not one of this book’s appealing features; just the opposite is true: in an attempt to be friendly and informal, the writing is chatty and extremely verbose. If the mark of good writing is to avoid useless words, the advice to these authors is to avoid useless words, avoid useless sentences, and avoid useless paragraphs. The line between a friendly tone and a patronizing, condescending tone depends, to a large extent, on the reader. I found that line repeatedly crossed, particularly in numerous “don’t worry” exhortations.
Although the index is 54 pages long, several key entries are missing. It does not collect references into a single list. Instead, the introduction mentions five external Internet resources; a few products are mentioned throughout the text, and chapter 30 lists more than a dozen URLs related to AppleScriptObjC and Objective-C. There are no end-of-chapter questions or exercises, but readers do have plenty of opportunities to learn and experiment by copying scripts or script snippets.
Readers could use this book for self-study, but I do not recommend it as a textbook.
