Take your basic scripting skills to the next level

Amaze your friends, delight your boss and thwart your enemies with your new scripting skills after learning from one of the humblest Apple admin rockstars around: our very own Bill Smith, aka talkingmoose.

Bill Smith's popular webinar and paper on Apple scripting for beginners now has an accompanying paper based on his Scripting 201 webinar for those who want to take their scripting skills to the next level.

Apple Scripting: An intermediate guide to automating common tasks offers detailed, step-by-step instructions on automating three common Apple admin tasks with three useful tools:

• Writing text to a file and retrieving it for later use
• Using script parameters in Jamf Pro
• Creating interactive dialogs using jamfHelper and osascript

Writing text to a file for later retrieval through Terminal using the echo command can be very handy for leaving behind a provisioning receipt that lets you know when a Mac was prepared and deployed and who built it. You can also add dates, departments and other information.

Using script parameters in Jamf Pro can help with creating and setting policies, provisioning and configuring setups.

And you can create dialogue boxes for walking users through necessary steps when onboarding or other step-by-step procedures with Jamfhelper and osacript.

Through it all, Bill walks you through understanding and implementing these scripts with detailed scripts you can use yourself, places to find other helpful scripts online, and how to set options and parameters using your new scripting skills.