| Book
Reviews
September 2004
AppleScript - The Definitive
Guide by Matt Neuburg
By Ric Getter
Ever since it made
its debut with System 7, AppleScript® never exuded the
star quality nor gained the wide following of its predecessor,
HyperCard®'s HyperTalk®. It's a far more powerful
language, but some of its complexities and inconsistencies
can make it difficult to master for the experienced programmer
and a challenge to learn for the newbie. Beyond Apple's recently
updated AppleScript Developer site, tutorials and incisive
documentation have been hard to come by. This has been remedied,
at least in part, with AppleScript: The Definitive Guide
recently released by O'Reilly.
The book is not for those looking
for a quick and easy entry point into AppleScript programming.
However, if you are a serious student or have grounding in
other programming languages, it will be hard to find a better
guidebook. Unlike Apple's own documentation, Neuburg provides
an honest, unprejudiced appraisal of AppleScript's strengths
and weaknesses and offers expert guidance in working with
and around them. |
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AppleScript: The Definitive
Guide by Matt Neuburg; O'Reilly, 453 pages, $39.95 |
The Definitive Guide starts
out with an overview of the language and how it can be used, drawing
parallels to other programming environments and providing a solid
point of reference for experienced programmers. If you're not a
member of that fortunate fraternity, it will likely be a challenge
(albeit a worthwhile one) to follow along. Using an example from
the author's real-world experience, we follow the sometimes-meandering
path from problem to solution via AppleScript. The remainder of
the book, representing the bulk of its 453 pages, is unquestionably
the most comprehensive and unbiased guide to the language ever written.
Reading through it is a little like sitting in on a graduate course
in AppleScript. With the author's background, this is no surprise.
Before turning his attention full time to Apple® and the Mac®
in the early 90's, Neuburg spent fourteen years teaching the Classics
at several prestigious universities around the world. (We get more
than a hint of this in the title of the Guide's sixth chapter, "Syntactic
Ground of Being." He is an excellent writer and doesn't take
such linguistic liberties with the text of the book.)
The book is not without its faults.
As we mentioned, it begins in a way that could frighten off many
readers. Also, a number of example scripts used to illustrate the
language succumb to a programmer's penchant for brevity, with single-character
variables and terse (if any) remarks blocks. This can make the sample
code in the book difficult to follow.
If AppleScript represents your first
foray into programming, The Definitive Guide may not be
the best place to start. However, if you're willing to sit down
and expend the effort to follow the book through, you will be rewarded
with the benefits of not only the author's years of programming
experience, but his remarkable analytical and problem solving skills.
iPod & iTunes: The
Missing Manual, 2nd Edition
By J.D. Biersdorfer
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Series: The Missing Manuals
350 pages,
$24.95 US, $36.95 CA
www.oreilly.com
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When you bought
your iPod you knew you weren't paying hundreds of dollars
for a mere MP3 player. In an age when the "iPod swap"
gives you a window into the life of its owner and iPods are
likely to come up in conversation, it pays to have a few hacks
up your sleeve. Besides, you might get some use out of an
external hard drive, a personal organizer, eBooks and video
games - just a few of the functions that have emerged for
the iPod in its brief existence.
J. D. Biersdorfer, who has
been writing the weekly Q&A column and feature articles
for the Circuits section of The New York Times since 1998,
explains in this updated edition to "iPod: the Missing
Manual," how to get the most out of the iPod, iTunes
and a year's worth of new hacks originating from Apple, and
Internet forums alike.
That you can use the iPod as
a PalmPilot by importing your calendar and address book and
navigating with the iPod's scroll pad is old hat, but beyond
personal organizer mimicry, it also doubles as an external
Firewire hard drive for backing-up or transporting huge files,
such as short videos. After connecting the iPod, Biersdorfer
explains, just turn on "Enable FireWire disk use,"
and after that, you can use it as an external drive like any
other while your music files are hidden away and protected.
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But what if you want to access those "hidden away" files
on an iPod? By default, the Firewire connection is set up as a sort
of one-way pipeline for file transfers. This makes sense, because
Apple couldn't very well champion its legal, music download service
while distributing a hyper-effective means of swapping entire libraries
of music. However, if you lose your hard drive, or for some other
reason, might want to copy files from an iPod to your computer's
hard drive, there are a number of applications available to help
you in this task and this manual will hold your hand through them.
For eBooks, the iPod does not compare
to some PDAs in terms of screen real estate, but you can still download
driving directions, recipes, and entire web pages as this manual
shows.
Now that you essentially have an
additional computer with the iPod, have some fun with it, and as
is usually the case with its Missing Manual series, this
edition is another go-to source for getting the most out of your
hardware and software without a huge time investment.
Hackers & Painters:
Big Ideas from the Computer Age
By Paul Graham
Want to buy some
Vyeag.ra/h? You can partly thank the hacker and writer Paul
Graham for deliberately misspelled email solicitations. You
can also thank him for not receiving 995 out of every 1000
pieces of SPAM attempted to reach you, as he was the one who
first popularized the use of Bayesian filters designed to
prevent those pesky pitches from reaching your inbox.
In Hackers & Painters:
Big Ideas from the Computer Age, Graham binds plainly
written essays on culture and technology, composing his insights
from his forays into computer science (he has a Ph.D from
Harvard) and his design sensibility (he is a painter and studied
at the Rhode Island School of Design).
These essays reflect Graham's
abiding interest in good design and range from commentary
on web-based software, explanations of how to get rich by
making others rich, expositions on why "best-practices"
virtually guarantee failure in the software industry, how
to balance original research and good design, and programming
now how we will be programming in the future (because why
wait) to his thoughts on his favorite language, Lisp. |
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O'Reilly Press
$22.95 (224 pages)
www.orielly.com
www.paulgraham.com |
According to Graham, "In most
fields the great work is done early on. The paintings made between
1430 and 1500 are still unsurpassed. Shakespeare appeared just as
professional theater was being born, and pushed the medium so far
that every playwright since has had to live in his shadow. Albrecht
Durer did the same thing with engraving, and Jane Austen with the
novel.
Over and over we see the same pattern. A new medium appears, and
people are so excited about it that they explore most of its possibilities
in the first couple generations. Hacking seems to be in this phase
now.
Painting was not, in Leonardo's time,
as cool as his work helped make it. How cool hacking turns out to
be will depend on what we can do with this new medium."
Eric S. Raymond, author of The
Cathedral and the Bazaar, writes in the foreword to Hackers
& Painters: "Paul's writing is, as you'll soon learn from
the rest of this book, wonderfully lucid stuff. Reading Paul's essays
is like having a conversation with a genius who doesn't need to
score any points by proving it to you, except that most geniuses
aren't as articulate as he is. You get to share Paul's sense that
the Universe is a fascinating place, and his knack for looking at
it from an unusual angle."
Hint: check out the essays link on
his website.
Digital Photographer's
Handbook by Tom Ang
Words by Ric Getter
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Digital Photographers Handbook by Tom Ang.
DK Publishing $40.00
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Not that it isn't
one of the world's finest publishing houses, renown for its
lavish layouts, impeccable graphics and encyclopedic coverage
of broad topics assembled in a way that makes them as likely
a candidate for a coffee table as a bookshelf. But there never
seemed to be a way that one of Dorling Kindersley's titles
would wind up as a featured review in a discriminating computer
journal.
This was one of those rare
cases when a book caught a reviewer's eye in passing and,
after thumbing through it, came to the realization that he
couldn't bring himself to leave the store without it. From
the moment you open it, you will also realize that Tom Ang's
Digital Photographer's Handbook is one of the best
volumes ever published on the topic. The lavish color photos
and illustrations that dominate virtually every page would
be more than enough to qualify for one of the highest ooh!
and ahh! ratings of any book on digital photography. But the
truth is that Tom Ang's words of wisdom, targeted at both
the new hobbyist and the more experienced digital photographer,
is loaded with topnotch advice and skill-building exercises
that take advantage of PhotoShop® and other professional
software and hardware imaging tools. |
The opening of the book provides
a broad introduction to digital photography hardware. Unlike many
lesser tomes on the topic, this includes ample coverage of film
cameras, film, and scanners. This section with give you the intellectual
armor you need to defend against the most aggressive salespeople.
The book continues with several chapters
dedicated to the craft of photography, stressing (but not limited
to) the digital perspective. As you would expect, it is lavishly
illustrated with Ang's remarkable work. If your picture-taking results
are less than you hoped, Ang begins to introduce the digital tools
and quick fix suggestions that will give your images a second chance.
His software of choice is Photoshop and Photoshop Elements with
screenshots and dialogs that are obviously from the Mac® version.
The book concludes with topics that are exclusively in the digital
realm, such as scanning, color management, special effects, and
printing.
Ang is a superb writer as well as
a talented photographer and teacher. His work is eminently readable
as both an introduction and an ongoing reference. And, with page
after page of exquisite imagery, it may even earn a place on your
coffee table.
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