Customer Reviews

The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide: For Developers and Designers Using Flash: For Developers and Designers Using Flash CS4 Professional (Adobe Developer Library)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I was browsing at Borders at Park Ave and 57th, where they had exactly one copy of this. I'd heard of this book but hadn't seen it yet--it was announced over the summer but O'Reilly kept delaying publication so the book could be current with Flash CS4. I looked up a few items in the ToC and index, and went straight to the checkout queue. I had to have this book right away! even if Amazon could sell it to me cheaper!

Okay, why is the book good? I've spent more time with it now. I'll give you my three biggest reasons:

1) It's readable. It really is. It's friendly and accessible. Did you ever enjoy those juvenile histories and biographies and How-and-Why science books that started out with something like, "Hi! This is a fun book, and we're going to take you on a fun journey, step-by-step. This is a great subject to be interested in! Aren't you happy? Well, we are!!!"?

Well, did you like books like that? I did, and I've always resented scholarly and technical books that didn't introduce themselves along those lines. So many of them are written like resentful documentation: "Go away. We hate you. This is only for ugly, squirrelly, socially backward people like US."

This book is overtly addressed to users of ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0, and those already using 3.0; to artists, designers, and developers of all stripes. It's all-inclusive. Like Rich Shupe's Learning ActionScript 3.0, it has a friendly, hand-holding attitude that goes through the length of the book.

2) A personal obsession: this book has a good section on how to write XML loaders that use HTML. This is a very poorly documented area of Flash. The ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook had a little bit on it, but the explanation was hard to follow and the code was buggy.

3) Another personal interest: SWF loaders and unloaders. This is the first book I've seen that tells you how to unload both the thing loaded and the "event listener" that keeps sitting there, using up processor time and space.

The book is also current with the less traditional Flash-related technologies, such as FlashDevelop and Flex.

Rich Shupe & crew have made a terrific guide for transitioning from AS2 to AS3. Their examples are clearly written, typically showing code written in both versions and pointing out the advantages of AS3 by comparison. Speaking as someone who uses flash as a designer primarily, his book as gone a great way towards making AS3 a lot less intimidating. Great job, highly recommend it.

Flash/Actionscript has been in a constant change of flux, not only with new versions of the Flash IDE every year or two, but with a complete revamp into ActionScript 3.0. Even accomplished programmers first attempting to work with ActionScript 3.0 will face daunting roadblocks with mediocre IDEs, awful debuggers and disorganized documentation - all varying across multiple versions.

Also very discouraging is the vast amount of garbage on the web for Flash and AS3 programming. With approximately 3 million flash programmers (according to Adobe) the internet has tons of worthless and very confusing material to wade through to find useful answers. Which means if you're like most developers, and expect to use the internet to find answers to complex language and IDE issues you're frequently going to find yourself out of luck with respect to Flash and AS3.

That's where this book comes in. The authors have explained the history and structure of not only ActionScript but the various IDEs and available editors - clearly and simply. Frankly its been a god send towards my becoming effective as an ActionScript programmer. That's why I believe anyone working on their own to learn ActionScript for Flash and Flex will find no better alternative for navigating the extremely noisy legacy of Flash and ActionScript. For example, the Adobe migration guide from AS2 to AS3 doesn't hold a candle to the work of these authors for comprehensive clarity.

I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone learning AS3 after they've read something like "Learning ActionScript 3.0" by Rich Shupe and Zevan Roosser. The same goes for anyone transitioning from AS2 to AS3. In my opinion, this book sets new conceptual standards Adobe should be using for all their future language documentation. If you're past the first stages of trying to learn AS3 spare yourself ongoing grief and read this book cover to cover. It's that good.

Let me start by saying that I've been using Flash for about 7 years, and most of them as a graphic artist. I was originally drawn to Flash because of its ease to make animations and its vector capabilities for the web. Over time, I kept experimenting with ActionScript 2 and though it was a struggle for a while as I come from a purely print oriented graphic design background, I eventually became very proficient at developing ActionScript 2 movies, using it to simulate some complex pharmaceutical packaging and manufacturing machines,their interfaces, and other procedures for training modules. Thus, I was extremely excited when I learned about the revamped ActionScript 3, which was to bring much better performance to the Flash Player and allow more creativity and give us better tools to develop Flash content. And then I got CS3, bought my first CS3 book (the Flash ActionScript 3.0 Bible), and I hit the wall. Suddenly, rather than just assign an action to a button using the onPress event for it, I had to learn the new Event Listener model. Suddenly, every book and resource I read about AS3 went on and on about Packages, Public vs Private variables, Class files, and all sorts of very intimidating terms. I decided that AS3 wasn't for me and kept publishing AS2 movies.

So, I recently got into a situation that I had to deliver an AS3 Flash movie and I was panicking. I decided to buy this book out on a hunch and wow it's been the best investment in a development book that I've ever done! Right off the bat, the author starts explaining why AS3 works the way it does, how AS2 was a stepping stone into the realm of AS3, and best of all, he explains how to transfer accumulated AS2 knowledge and experience to AS3 development. That is probably the most valuable detail about this book; not just that the author can teach the user AS3, but that he can teach AS2 veterans that have been avoiding AS3 like the plague how to transfer all of their know-how into AS3 magic.

So yea, I had avoided AS3 like a plague since the release of CS3. This book taught me how to handle it, and now I'm very excited at all the possibilities that AS3 brings; something no other book or web tutotial ever did for me.

Oh, and for what it's worth, even though the author constantly mentions Flash CS4, all of his examples (and the files at the book's website for the examples) work great with CS3.

No mention of Flex means ... nary a word about Flex.
I breezed through the book - however - I bought it from the standpoint of Flex.
I got some stuff out of it, but it's not geared to Flex - not at all.
It did seem to cover Flash very well and also moving from AS2 to AS3.
MXML is shown in the index one time, on page 19, and that's it for the index.
I'll give it 4star since it does seem to cover Flash/CS2/CS3 fairly well.
I'm probably going to have to sell mine and look elsewhere for Flex/CS3.