Google Apps Script is the script language for Google Apps. If you are an Office user, think VBA, but in the cloud, with all the connectivity and share-ability that brings, and as an added bonus, the language of Apps Script is JavaScript.
The official Apps Script documentation.
The documentation for Apps Script largely consists of very well structured and generally accurate, up to date and well written reference material (useful once you know what you want to do, and roughly how to do it) , and a fairly uninspiring collection of samples, written some years ago. So does this kind of learning material suit the background of the people that are coming to Apps Script?
The Apps Script G+ community
The Google Apps Script G+ community is a very active group for developers, with about 12.5k members. I took a poll of the members last week to see where they had come from. It was very well subscribed, and although obviously the respondents were self selecting, the sample size means it should have a margin of error of under 10%. Here are the results when asked how they ended up on the community.
There are obviously plenty of other developers that are not part of this community, but assuming we have a representative set here, this is fairly interesting result, and should provide some useful information for more targeted product documentation, and for those of us who produce learning material.
- Only 23% are scripting for the first time – so in addition to catering for them, tutorials should put more emphasis on leveraging existing experience.
- Of those that have scripting experience, 62% of them have come from VBA, so a clear migration path and emphasis on the mapping between the platforms would be useful for this population.
- My new book on O’Reilly media – Going Gas, From VBA to Apps Script.
- My video tutorial course from Infinite Skills, Google Apps Script for Developers.
- The desktop liberation site, and community.
- My youtube channel