Lingo in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference: Amazon.ca: Bruce A. Epstein: Books

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Once again, O'Reilly scores big with a comprehensive treatment of a programming language that doesn't spend much time teaching the fundamentals. Lingo in a Nutshell sets a benchmark for Lingo documentation that no other book or online resource meets.

Lingo in a Nutshell has to do with behind-the-scenes aspects of Lingo, including file management, data structures, loops, conditionals, and event handlers. Simply put, this book treats Lingo as a programming language, rather than merely as a piece of Macromedia Director. The coverage you'll find in Lingo in a Nutshell backs up the more obviously practical material found in this book's companion volume, Director in a Nutshell. This book also features an excellent chapter called "How Lingo Thinks," which explains how the various pieces of a Lingo-controlled presentation fit together.

Like most Nutshell books, Lingo in a Nutshell includes a very good language reference in addition to its tutorial and explanatory materials. Listing Lingo's enumerated values, keywords, and commands in full--including some otherwise undocumented ones--this reference makes it easy to locate the information you need as you write programs. The only minor drawback of this book is that it doesn't cover the changes made to Lingo in the newly released Director 7. --David Wall

Book Description

Macromedia Director 6 is the premiere authoring tool for delivering interactive content on both the Internet and the desktop. It is the dominant multimedia package for Windows 95/NT, Windows 3.1, and the Macintosh. A quarter million developers use Director® to incorporate animation and audio into dynamic Web pages, and to create engaging interactive corporate presentations, multimedia advertising, entertainment CD-ROMs, Enhanced music CDs, and even DVDs.

Lingo is Director's powerful scripting language. This companion book to Director in a Nutshell is an essential tool for both new and experienced Lingo programmers seeking a deeper knowledge of the language. Bruce Epstein is the author of both these books and brings years of hands-on experience with Director and Lingo. The book includes numerous useful Lingo examples. Exhaustively tested, this book corrects many errors found in Macromedia's Lingo documentation and repeated verbatim in most third-party books. Extremely comprehensive, this book details dozens of misdocumented and undocumented Lingo keywords that are omitted from Macromedia's manuals and third-party books.

Lingo in a Nutshell caters to the huge pool of Director users attempting to bridge the Lingo gap, yet provides the details for the experienced Linguist that are lacking in other Lingo books. In typical nutshell style (clear, concise, deep and narrow) this book explores the syntax, structure and commands of the Lingo language. The detailed chapters describe messages, events, scripts, handlers, variables, lists, file I/O, Behaviors, child objects, Xtras, and more. This book teaches you to troubleshoot and debug common Lingo errors. Lingo in a Nutshell is the book for which both Director users and power Lingo programmers have been yearning.

The book extensively covers topics not found in other Lingo books:

Cross-platform Lingo differences
Lingo internals for experienced programmers
Events, messages, and scripts
Timers, tempos, cue points, and synchronization
Data types and expressions
Math, numerical expressions, geometry, and trigonometry
Coordinates, alignment, and registration point

Lingo in a Nutshell is the most concise and compete guide available. It is a high-end handbook at a low-end price. An essential desktop reference for every Director user.

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1.8 out of 5 stars (4 customer reviews)

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1.0 out of 5 stars WAY out of date, Feb 5 2003

By

Paul Clark "paulcl102" (Seatle WA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

This review is from: Lingo in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (Paperback)

This book was written for Director 6.5, and currently Director is past 8.5 (MX is basically Director 9). So forget about anything about behaviors, library palette, anything 3D.. in short, this book was out of date 5 years ago.

Beyond this, the nutshell library is designed as a reference for programmers who want to quick-reference a new language. If you're already up to speed on C++, Java, SQL, etc, then the nutshell format will make sense as you seehow Director includes functions and classes in the form of handlers and properties. However, for the novice programmer looking to learn more about scripting Lingo, this book is awful.

I'd recommend the Director Demystified series instead, whatever's the latest edition. Macromedia's version updates aren't drastic, so at this point a book covering 8.5 is just fine.

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1.0 out of 5 stars Lingo in a Nutshell - OUTDATED, Dec 24 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Lingo in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (Paperback)

Beware if you're buying this book, it covers lingo up to version 6, and director's most recent version is 8.5.

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1.0 out of 5 stars This book is, simply, terrible..., Dec 4 2002

By

Brent (Atlanta, Georgia United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Lingo in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference (Paperback)

I can't emphasize enough how I would encourage readers NOT to purchase this book. Not only is it out of date (to no fault of its author), but it is incredibly disorganized (directly the fault of its author). This, however, is not unusual for O'Reilly books which are notorious for a general lack of order and the inclusion of irrelevant material. Should you ignore my advice, I'm certain you'll find yourself flipping back and forth as you read each chapter in succession, as nothing is covered ("Refer to Chapter X for details on X" is something you run into practically on every page) in cohesive chunks. And you'll also get other useful tips like "Experiment until you have a firm grasp of when the different handlers in different scripts are being called or until you are totally confused. Then start with new movie, and try it all again." That little gem applies equally as well to reading the book as it does to handling Lingo's archaic structure...

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4.0 out of 5 stars At the time it was a goodie...
This one sat next to the 'Bible' in class and at home. The Lingo dictionary if you would...
Now to see if they have an updated version.

Published on April 24 2002 by gizmovision