Where to Learn More
As noted earlier, AppleScript isn’t something you can master in a day or two. Fortunately, few Mac technologies have more ardent fans than AppleScript, and free beginners’ (and experts') tutorials are available all over the Web. It may be a while before this material is updated for Mac OS X, but in the meantime, you can study the Mac OS 9 material; most of it is applicable in Mac OS X.
Begin your quest at Apple’s AppleScript Web site, http://www.apple.com/applescript. There you’ll find a link to an excellent, step-by-step tutorial in hand-coding scripts, as well as links to these outstanding online AppleScript guides:
Bill Briggs’ AppleScript Primers. Read dozens of articulate, thoughtful tutorials for the beginning scripter. A good exercise might be to restart your Mac in Mac OS 9, work through the tutorials, then go back to Mac OS X and, as homework, try to figure out how to modify the featured scripts to run in Mac OS X.
AppleScript Guidebooks. Download and install these additions to the Help→Help Center menu (Mac OS 9 only). Each adds, to your built-in Mac help system, detailed instructions on various specialized AppleScript topics: Open Transport, subroutines, speech, program linking, and so on. Each includes several dozen sample scripts for you to dissect. It’s worth booting into Mac OS 9 to study them.
AppleScript mailing lists. Sign up for one of these free, email-based discussion lists whose members are all AppleScript fans. Apple runs one; the MacScript ...
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