Re: [MacPerl] Applescript books - opinions please

[Jonathan Eunice <develop@illuminata.com>]

Paul J. Schinder (schinder@pobox.com) writes:

> [Applescript is] one of the most frustrating languages you'll ever use. 

And how!  Let me rant the ways:

1. In trying to be like a natural language, it's got innumerable
   ways of stating every little thing.  Which variants are usable at a 
   given time varies considerably. 
   
2. It is a language for talking to applications, yet it encouages
   app developers to provide an "object model" above and beyond,
   and thus often quite different from, the one that most users
   experience through the standard GUI interface.  The AS interface
   is thus often absent, buggy or incomplete when provided, and
   almost never supported.
   
3. Though "driving" the user interface as a normal user would do
   would be the easiest and most direct way to handle many scripting
   tasks, AS has no mechanism whatsoever for doing this.
   There is an (invaluable) third-party product, PreFab Player, that 
   lets an Applescript programmer navigate as users do, but because
   it's an add-on rather thans something built into the OS, it only 
   works some of the time.
   
4. <timing and synchronization problems Paul mentioned earlier>

Apple could have saved itself and everyone else huge amounts of
time, money, and energy, and had a better product besides, had it
started by providing a regular, reliable system for navigating every
MacOS menu, dialog box, and control item. 


Andrew Robinson (Awrobinson@aol.com) writes:

> I checked Amazon.com for books on Applescript. Alas, the highly
> recommended and highly rated Goodman book is out of print. 

If you mean _Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook_, I would neither
rate nor recommend it highly.  It got me through rough spots that
otherwise would have frustrated me to death, but it's not
particularly orderly or well-organized, especially for experienced
programmers.  It couldn't compare, for example, to the
Wall/Christiansen/Schwartz _Programming Perl_ book.

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