9.14 Further Study

Given that writing scripts for the Windows Script Host is a language-dependent endeavor, the most helpful reference material will be specific to the particular language you're using. Microsoft's support web site for all their scripting technologies, including WSH, can be found at http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting/. In addition to documentation on VBScript and JScript, you can download updates to the WSH engine. Note that if you distribute scripts to other machines, you'll need to be careful about supporting features found only in newer releases of WSH.

Before committing to VBScript for a project, you may want to do some research on other supported languages listed here. Due to VBScript's heritage in web pages, security concerns have resulted in some limitations in the VBScript language, such as its inability to access the clipboard or link to external .dll files.

Given that JavaScript (which actually has nothing whatsoever to do with Sun Microsystems' Java programming language) was created by Netscape, you can find a lot of developer information at: http://developer.netscape.com/tech/javascript/. Keep in mind, however, that JScript is Microsoft's bastardized version of JavaScript and therefore not exactly the same language.

The Practical Extract and Report Language (Perl) is probably the most powerful and flexible scripting language available for the Windows Script Host at the time of this writing. It's traditionally very popular among the Unix crowd and has gained tremendous popularity for its use in writing CGI programs for web servers.

Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn't come with the Perl engine; you'll have to obtain a separate Perl add-on module from http://www.activestate.com. More information is available at http://www.perl.com.