Just getting started

[ewhite]

I work at a college and am relatively new to imaging in general (with two “old fashioned” images under my belt and a few Apple seminars about deployment), and for our next round of Macs I’d really like to use InstaDMG instead of working on an image on the latest piece of hardware & hoping that it works on the rest, cleaning it all up, doing it all over again in a few months, etc.

I’ve installed InstaDMG and started building something extremely basic, my first question is: what’s the best resource for learning more shell scripting? Any book recommendations?

Same for package making. I’ve made a few simple packages using PackageMaker, but find the official documentation pretty useless. After doing some research and looking into options, I will probably use logGen + pkgGen, but would really appreciate any pointers or resources that you’ve found useful.

Again, thanks for any tips or advice!

[Patrick Fergus]

A decent (but cracker-dry) book for learning the bash shell is Learning the bash Shell:

http://www.amazon.com/Learning-bash-Shell-Nutshell-OReilly/dp/0596009658/

There’s no OS X specific information in there though–it’s purely platform-agnostic bash. Regarding PackageMaker, I’m not entirely sure where there’d be a better set of information about PM than the official docs.

Sorry I don’t have more.

– Patrick

[Rusty Myers]

Just a couple links from my bookmarks:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-satbuildscript.html

http://www.macdevcenter.com/pub/a/mac/2003/11/07/scripting_osx.html

http://tldp.org/LDP/Bash-Beginners-Guide/html/index.html

Everything I have wanted to script, so far, I have been able to google and find. Good luck and enjoy!

[mattzago]

If you want a book that is readable then check out:

http://www.apress.com/book/view/1590593766

I have had nothing but a great experience working through that book because it doesn’t assume anything (which is great for scripting newbies).

[ewhite]

Thank you all for the links… I’ve got a lot of ground to cover before this gets “easy”!

— Esther

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