Lingo Sorcery: The Magic of Lists, Objects and Intelligent Agents, 2nd Edition

Lingo Sorcery exhibits extreme clarity and patience in showing its readers how to become true Lingo programmers, rather than just graphic artists who know how to use Lingo in order to get the effects they want. What's more, Lingo Sorcery uses Lingo as a springboard into object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts.

Peter Small shows how to work with objects (particularly lists) and offers a lot of help in conceptualizing what they are and what they can do. He goes into considerable detail about Lingo's messaging model--the means by which Lingo objects communicate with one another--and explains the powerful object-user interface, including Lingo's ability to alter user-interface elements on the fly.

After explaining Lingo OOP with a carefully arranged series of segments, Small shows how the concepts he's taught can be applied to specific Lingo objects in specific situations. He shows how to implement an advice-dispensing animated help character by working magic with a movie in a window (MIAW) object, for example.

Small has added coverage of behaviors and of the expandable API, including the Net Xtras, while maintaining the tutorial content that proved popular in the first edition of this book. He does not touch upon the changes to Lingo made in Director 7, however. --David Wall