Chapter 10. Organizing Information in Databases

It might seem geeky, but databases are a cornerstone of computing. They're absolutely everywherefrom iTunes's jukebox feature to Amazon.com's book listings. Even if you haven't bought a dedicated database program like FileMaker Pro (Section 10.4), you encounter databases every day in your regular computer work.

"But what is a database?" you're probably wondering. A database is a computerized information tablea spreadsheet, in essence. If you imagine turning an Excel document into a database, for example, each row in the spreadsheet would correspond to a record (entry) in the database, while each column in the spreadsheet would correspond to a field (specific information in an entry) of the database. Group a bunch of records together, and voila! You have a database.

The example scripts from this chapter can be found on the AppleScript Examples CD (see Sidebar 2.1 for instructions).