With this second edition I have produced the version of this book I would have preferred all along but failed to produce the first time around, owing to limitations of time and to my own sheer ignorance. (Sorry about that; the same thing happened with my REALbasic book, which required a second edition in order to achieve its proper form.) The presentation has been heavily reorganized, nearly every paragraph has been thoroughly rewritten, many facts about AppleScript that were misapprehended or left in doubt in the first edition have been at last sussed out and presented definitively and correctly, and of course everything has been thoroughly updated to reflect Tiger and other innovations two years on. I have also (as I did for the second edition of my REALbasic book) written the index myself.
My thanks go most particularly to readers of the first edition who provided corrections, criticism, feedback, and suggestions; I have taken their input very much to heart. Also I wish to thank the denizens of Apple's AppleScript-Users mailing list for letting me play in their sandbox; they have often opened my eyes to facts and possibilities that would not otherwise have occurred to me. I am grateful once again to Apple's own AppleScript team, who provided many a helpful and entertaining hour at the AppleScript Pro Sessions in Monterey, California, in May 2005 and at WWDC in San Francisco a month later. As always, I have benefitted from personal correspondence from many people, especially Mark Alldritt, Paul Berkowitz, Hamish Sanderson, and the daring duo of William Cook and Warren Harris. Michael Terry performed a truly incisive technical review, and I have been inspired by many of his suggestions. Nancy Kotary once again helped immensely with her clear-eyed copyediting. Finally I wish to thank my editor, Chuck Toporek, and the entire team at O'Reilly Media, for their patience, encouragement, expertise, assistance, adaptability, and industry.