Hi
I’m really just starting with AppleScript, and I’d appreciate recommendations on books worth reading to get the basic ‘grammar and vocabulary’ clear. There aren’t that many available here in England - what do people think about the SAMS book?
There are certain Finder tasks I want to script, but I just don’t know enough to know where to start.
In particular right now, I want to be able to copy the contents of a folder (with no subfolders) to another specified folder, overwriting files without prompting.
hey i’m fairly new also and i got started with the Sams book, Teach Yourself AppleScript in 24 Hours. it was a pretty good primer. it moves forward without giving you a lot of details sometimes. when i started though i had zero programming experience so it was a bit harder. overall i’m real happy with it. i originally bought the O’Reilly AppleScript in a Nutshell but returned after a few days. t just wasn’t getting through to me, maybe the way it was laid out. Just didn’t like it. i recently saw a Visual Quickstart Guide called ApplScript for Applications but it didn’t look very good and i read some bad reviews. i’d say stay away from AppleScript for Dummies. it’s just awful. has more lame jokes than helpful knowledge. i have OS X Unleashed as well and that has some AppleScript stuff, mostly Unix though. so far i’d say the Sams book is the best i’ve seen, definitely the most current. one bad point though, it says in the book that ALL the example scripts and files are available for download from the Sams website, so you can play along tutorial-style. problem is that there is actually only 4 random chapters available on the site. i contacted Sams and they wanted to help. they contacted the author of the book and told me that he was “unresponsive”. they offered me a full refund. i kept the book though, i like it a lot. sorry for the long message everybody. hope that helps.
There are many AppleScript books available, and we’ve reviewed qiute a few of them. Take a look at our books section from the link below.
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http://macscripter.net/books/