Want to Learn AppleScript? Check Out this Book

David Blatner

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It took five years, but the book on AppleScript finally came out: AppleScript 1-2-3, by Sal Soghoian and Bill Cheeseman. I’ve known Sal for almost 20 years, and while his jazz bass guitar playing is pretty darn good, his scripting is out of this world. He was voted least-likely-to-ever-get-a-job-at-a-big-company, but suddenly (some years ago) he was hired as the applescript evangelist and product manager at Apple. As such, he not only saved AppleScript from an early demise, but in fact has become the face of AppleScript to the world.

So it’s fitting that his face is actually on the cover of the book… made from bits of code. It’s trippy. But no more trippy than The Dude.

(By the way, Sal actually pulled off the world’s best demo ever about a decade ago, when he showed how to lay out a page in QX and send it to Kinkos, completely automated using AppleScript… triggered by buttons pressed on a cell phone from across the stage. This was long before iphones, and he had to actually dial in to a Sophisticated Circuits UPS unit which translated phone tones to applescript messages. It was jaw-dropping.)

Anyway, I digress. Bill Cheeseman is no slouch at AppleScript either, having been one of the world’s great AS resources for many years. (Though it still weirds me out that a guy named Cheeseman lives in a place called Quechee, Vermont.)

Sal has been trying to write this book for what seems like forever. Bill finally came along to help and add his own brilliance. And now it’s a book. Actually in print.

So the whole point here is: If you want to learn AppleScript, you need this book. There. That wasn’t so hard, was it?