Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials

This book is aimed primarily at organizations that have implemented Google Apps for mail and collaboration, with a focus on power users in Google Docs and Google Sites. Those of you who only know Google Apps as Gmail and shared documents will be amazed at how much heavy lifting author James Ferreira does, with no more than some simple code and the Google Apps platform. Calling Apps a platform is accurate, since Google provides a huge number of public APIs that allow users on an Apps domain to automate anything. Google Apps administrators typically bump into these APIs as they are transitioning their organization from a legacy mail system like Exchange or Lotus Notes to the Google Apps suite of products. APIs are definitely a key piece of administering Apps for email, user management, and mail distribution groups, but most people end up interacting with these APIs through a web interface provided by Google. In the same vein, Google Docs and Sites include a huge number of APIs that most of us only experience through menus and keyboard shortcuts. Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials takes us on a short tour under the hood of Apps, demonstrating how use of Google's App Script can greatly extend the benefits of moving to Google Apps for an organization.

When we say "short tour," we really mean it. Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials seems positively emaciated compared to other reference books in the O'Reilly library at about 200 pages. It's not a bad thing, especially because Ferreira packs in a ton of utility by not wasting time on non-essentials. Although he includes a disclaimer that Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials wasn't written with programmers in mind, it does help to have some handle on Javascript or some other scripting language, such as Perl or Python. Even a little work with shell scripting would help prepare you, but the closest comparison is likely to be Javascript. Explaining what Apps Script is to Google Docs would be most clear for Microsoft Office users who worked with Visual Basic to extend programs like Excel, on the desktop. Where Apps Script becomes even more powerful is in its integration with Google Sites. Sites provide Apps users with a WYSIWYG interface for building basic websites, excellent for wikis and for sharing information within or without your firewall. What Ferreira showcases in Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials are methods for turning Sites into resources for data collection and reporting, or even corporate workflow. Whether you're using Docs or Sites now for anything beyond creating memos, presentations, and link collections, reading the tutorials in this book will arm you with some specific examples of extended use cases. Included in each example is the code with annotation, and screenshots showing you how the finished product should appear.

Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials is organized in such a way as to provide a basic introduction to the concepts behind Apps Script, before you get started building full-blown applications. Thank goodness, if you're not a veteran developer, right? Those looking to jump in and start programming will be relieved to find that the preamble is brief. Ferreira begins by orienting us on where to find the built-in IDE that stores scripts, how to craft a basic "Hello world" script and run it, and how to build a UI for your application. For those not familiar with the new functionality in Docs, Google now offers a drag-and-drop UI editor. Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials shows how this tool can be useful, as well as showcasing the method for generating a UI on a code basis only. From the point where you have your "workbench" established, Ferreria devotes most of the book to practical examples. That guy from sales or marketing or finance needs something delivered, and you have a chance to build it with Apps Script... This approach to a topic like Google Script shows an understanding of how developers will actually use these tools in the workplace. Apps Script isn't likely to replace your retail website any time soon, but it can automate order entry or invoice approval, behind the scenes. An extended section on handing data and using forms to collect information helps extend the Forms feature that Google has provided as a fairly bare service. Enterprise Application Essentials does a nice job of showing how developers can extend Google's tools beyond their end-user functionality, making something like a Google Form perform as an email routing service, a workflow engine, or the front end to some less sophisticated company system.

What's not here is a tutorial on the most basic elements of Apps Script, as in what you would need to get started as a 100% non-programmer. The missing 200 pages (by O'Reilly instructional manual standards) are really what would make this "Learning Apps Script" or "Apps Script in a Nutshell," rather than Google Script: Enterprise Application Essentials. If we had to guess, we'd say that Ferreira made a conscious decision not to gild the lily with instruction, since Google built and maintains a large resource online to help raw beginners learn Apps Script. Also, since the Google platform is changing so rapidly, any basic documentation might fall quickly out of date. So, if you've just been tasked with learning how to extend your company's recently purchased Google Apps instance, buy this book. Depending on your programming skills, you may need to spend time perusing Google's documentation on Apps Script, but once you understand the fundamentals, Ferreira will help you go from greenhorn to guru in a short span.