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Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials: Adding Functionality to Your Google Apps
How can you extend Google Apps to fit your organization’s needs? This concise guide shows you how to use Google Scripts, the JavaScript-based language that provides a complete web-based development platform―with no downloads, configuration, or compiling required. You’ll learn how to add functionality to Gmail, spreadsheets, and other Google services, or build data-driven apps that run from a spreadsheet, in a browser window, or within a Google Site. If you have some JavaScript experience, getting started with Google Scripts is easy. Through code examples and step-by-step instructions, you’ll learn how to build applications that authenticate users, display custom data from a spreadsheet, send emails, and many more tasks.
- GenresProgramming
212 pages, Paperback
First published December 22, 2011
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21 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 26, 2014
I can understand some of the criticisms of this book. Many code examples include reference errors (say, calling a spreadsheet “DataSpreadsheet” in the text, then in the code as “DataCollectionSpreadsheet”), making it hard for a beginner to follow.
Okay. That sucks: O’Reilly should have debugged the text. But are code errors worth a 1-star review on a book introducing a new technology? I do not think so—though I’m an experienced code jockey…
That said, this is the only reliable book on a game-changing technology, Google Apps Script (GAS). Based on JavaScript syntax, GAS functions like VBA does in the Microsoft Office Suite. It allows you to create customer routines. Unlike Office Suite VBA routines, which often require Security overrides which can freak-out users, GAS runs in the cloud. All user see is the result, while the code executes on the Google server.
The text covers 2 ways to build an interactive form – Google’s UI builder or direct coding Unfortunately, Google phased out the UI Builder AFTER the book was published. So to follow the examples you will have to “code” the UI. Which is similar to coding UI’s in Java. Nor is the new HTML/ CSS form handling covered – an update occurring AFTER the book release.
Sigh. Keeping up with a new technology is like shooting a Mexican Jumping Bean with a rubber band…
Failings aside, the book does a great job familiarizing you with a technology. The examples are clear and relevant. Anyone with a modicum of programming experience would be able to expand on the examples while using GAS to “solve” their unique problems.
To counter the super-negative reviews, I was tempted to give this a 5-star review. But that would have been dishonest. However, since this is the only reliable, entry-level book on GAS, it deserves at least 3-stars. And since the text addresses 90% of what most web developers would use any data-driven web-design tool for – gathering form submissions, creating online catalogs, tracking system errors, etc. – I give the book 4-stars. When, truth be told, it deserves only a 3-star rating because of the cod errors.
As an FYI, GAS is free, data-drive, but slow. If you are contemplating using GAS on an external website, don’t. Learn PHP or ASP.NET. I “had” to learn GAS when I started a new job where Google Docs had replaced Office. Because I am lazy and automate everything I can, I needed to get up to snuff in a hurry.
Okay. That sucks: O’Reilly should have debugged the text. But are code errors worth a 1-star review on a book introducing a new technology? I do not think so—though I’m an experienced code jockey…
That said, this is the only reliable book on a game-changing technology, Google Apps Script (GAS). Based on JavaScript syntax, GAS functions like VBA does in the Microsoft Office Suite. It allows you to create customer routines. Unlike Office Suite VBA routines, which often require Security overrides which can freak-out users, GAS runs in the cloud. All user see is the result, while the code executes on the Google server.
The text covers 2 ways to build an interactive form – Google’s UI builder or direct coding Unfortunately, Google phased out the UI Builder AFTER the book was published. So to follow the examples you will have to “code” the UI. Which is similar to coding UI’s in Java. Nor is the new HTML/ CSS form handling covered – an update occurring AFTER the book release.
Sigh. Keeping up with a new technology is like shooting a Mexican Jumping Bean with a rubber band…
Failings aside, the book does a great job familiarizing you with a technology. The examples are clear and relevant. Anyone with a modicum of programming experience would be able to expand on the examples while using GAS to “solve” their unique problems.
To counter the super-negative reviews, I was tempted to give this a 5-star review. But that would have been dishonest. However, since this is the only reliable, entry-level book on GAS, it deserves at least 3-stars. And since the text addresses 90% of what most web developers would use any data-driven web-design tool for – gathering form submissions, creating online catalogs, tracking system errors, etc. – I give the book 4-stars. When, truth be told, it deserves only a 3-star rating because of the cod errors.
As an FYI, GAS is free, data-drive, but slow. If you are contemplating using GAS on an external website, don’t. Learn PHP or ASP.NET. I “had” to learn GAS when I started a new job where Google Docs had replaced Office. Because I am lazy and automate everything I can, I needed to get up to snuff in a hurry.
January 11, 2014
I discovered this technology a few weeks before start reading this book and I had been keen by Google Script. Unfortunately this book didn't show me much of interesting part of Google Script. Maybe it's a problem of technology itself, maybe this book isn't well written. Anyway, it's difficult for me to give more than 1 start when I lost all my motivation for Google Script after reading this book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews