C.3. Books

Although Web sites and email lists are convenient for discovering tidbits of information, there's often no substitute for a physical book. Booksespecially those in the following listcover a single topic more thoroughly than a Web site ever could.

• Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition by David Pogue (O'Reilly/Pogue Press, 2004). A helpful guide to absolutely every important feature in Mac OS X.

• Danny Goodman's AppleScript Handbook, 2nd Edition by Danny Goodman (Random House, 1995). Even though it's an old AppleScript book, the detailed language explanations from this book are still pertinent today.

• AppleScript: The Definitive Guide by Matt Neuberg (O'Reilly, 2004). A very thorough AppleScript reference with in-depth explanations of all the language's features.

• Learning Cocoa with Objective-C by James Duncan Davidson & Apple Computer, Inc. (O'Reilly, 2003). An introduction to Cocoa, Apple's preferred program-writing language for Mac OS X.

• Learning Unix for Mac OS X Panther, 2nd Edition by Dave Taylor & Brian Jepson (O'Reilly, 2004). A guide to the various Unix programs included with Mac OS X. If you use the do shell script command often (Section 13.2), you'll want this book.

• AppleScript: A Comprehensive Guide to Scripting and Automation on Mac OS X by Hanaan Rosenthal (Friends of Ed, 2004). This book teaches AppleScript using real-world examples, illustrating how the language is used.

With these sources by your side, AppleScript should never confuse you again. Now for the best part: writing your own scripts!