MEL Scripting for Maya Animators

Rating:
Summary: Very useful book.
Review: What I like about this book is that it isn't just a rehash of the documentation. It talks about how MEL and expressions fit into the bigger picture of Maya, which is a perspective I never got from the documentation.

The first half of the book is all about how the MEL language and expressions work, and the second half is a series of fourteen examples that cover dynamics, character rigging, and even a simple crowd system. The discussion in the first half is very straightforward but not too simple or too technical, and the examples illustrate very useful techniques. (One nice thing is that you can download the code for the examples -- even the odd commands that the chapter asks you to type along the way -- from the authors' website.)

I would have loved to have twice as many examples, but they already take up half of a thick book, so I guess I have to wait for Volume 2.