If you are reading this book, there is a good chance you have heard of Google and its powerful office productivity suite, Google Apps. Google offers search, email, word processing, and hundreds of other cloud applications and services that can be available to the individual and can scale all the way up to massive corporations and governments. As one of Google’s most popular services, Google Apps offers some of the best online office products available and is an excellent example of web-based applications that out perform legacy desktop software.

This book is about Google Apps Script, which is a service that runs from Google Apps, like Sites and Documents. Google Script is extremely powerful when automating many of the tasks required by day-to-day spreadsheet operations, but it also scales up to provide a complete application platform. If you are coming from a Microsoft Office direction, you can think of it as the macros for Google Documents, but unlike simple macros in MS Office, Google Script has a mature online editor with all the features one would expect in a development platform. Unleash Google Script’s user interface capability and you can create entire data driven websites and applications that run across most modern browsers, including mobile.

In addition to the integrated development environment (IDE), Google Script comes complete with a manager for organizing scripts, built-in debugging, auto code completion, timed event triggers, and automated revisioning to name a few features. What really caught this author’s attention was that everything is web-based. There is no need to download and configure a code editor or transport development files from computer to computer, wasting time resynchronizing files and reconnecting libraries. Simply sign into your Google account and start creating. Google Scripts are written in the JavaScript language version 1.8/ECMA 262 (3rd Edition), so there is no need to compile the code, making application development very fast.