Customer Reviews

ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Knowing nothing about Actionscript and having pitifully little programming experience, I turned to this book as a first step in learning Actionscript. It is very much part of the "Type this, click that" teaching method, which is great for getting your feet wet. You read through and do the exercises and stuff happens on the screen. The author includes some detail about Actionscript, but he doesn't discuss anything in depth. I found myself wanting more information in just about every exercise.

For example, the book includes an exercise for making a sort of word game. The program has arrays of names, verbs, and nouns. The interface also has inputs for adding words to the arrays. When the player presses the "generate" button, the program is supposed to fill in the blanks with words from the lists. Unfortunately, I found that the program frequently fails to generate a word, leaving a hole in the sentence. I know that can be fixed; but if I want to fix it, I have to do research and fix it myself. The book goes no further.

Along the same line, most of the exercises are empty exercises. The author frequently ends sections with instructions to close the exercise windows without saving the work. Larger projects are not followed from start to finish, either. Everything is broken into bite-sized pieces and pre-digested.

I've never used Lynda products before. While I did get something out of the book, I wouldn't really recommend it because it's not rigorous enough to truly learn Actionscript programming. It's just an introduction. I suppose that's the idea. To get the full education, you have to buy more products and do more exercises. I will look elsewhere for more information and give this book three stars.

I purchased this book expecting to get a good grasp on Actionscript 3.0 by the time I was finished. After going through 3/4 of the book, and exercises, I finally stopped.

Let me first mention what I have found/do find nice in this book.
1. On pages 4-5 there is a nice comparison between AS2 & AS3. Top-notch. I have not encountered another example as clear as this. Since then I have purchased 5 more major references to AS3 and none of them are as clear to me as this.
2. The operator & function list (p.55-56) is the best quick reference I have found yet.
3. The same goes for the accepted sound formats (p.297).
4. Having found an easier book to learn AS from scratch "Learning ActionScript 3.0 - A beginner's Guide". Now I value this book for my ability to find sample code quickly.

That being said...I had a very rough time learning with this book. The supposedly helpful explanations (on pages 29, 41, 49, 65, 133) are more confusing than helpful. Some better analogy would have served his purpose better. I hope this is changed in future revisions.

Another difficulty was that for each section, the book repeatedly uses the same illustration. This makes it difficult to learn.

This is not a beginner's book. But, after you get some AS under your belt, this book sure makes a decent reference.

ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training

I can't understand the glowing reviews that were given by 2 people who were not users. Like all lynda.com training, the book is overly simplistic having you type in code that they give you. I can't for the life of me understand how one can learn action script by this method (especially a beginner). The graphics included on the CD are also very simplistic and after 11 chapters of the same images boring.

What this book does, it does very well. It illustrates the new syntax and methods of AS3, and shows you exactly how to use them. It is illustrated and organized so efficiently that it can function as a "cookbook" reference.

It's a deceptively compact book, very handsomely bound and thoroughly illustrated with color screenshot examples. It is much better printed than earlier lynda-dot-com H-O-T Flash books (cleaner typography, opaque paper for color printing), though inside there's a superficial family resemblance. You get a series of step-by-step, read-and-type exercises, as well as a few supporting video tutorials. It even uses the old "snowboarder" example that the H-O-T books have used for the last three versions of Flash.

As I say, the resemblance is only superficial. The tutorials are much more concentrated than is usual. The chapters and subsections are short--a key concept may be covered and demonstrated in just two or three pages--but this concentration of material can make it very slow-going, requiring two or three re-reads. The few videos provided seem to be there merely for tradition's sake and add little to the tutorials.

I recommend this book but do not recommend attempting to learn AS3 from this book alone. Its virtue is its limitation: the author covers all the basics, seldom digressing from his lessons, so you may feel cramped and distracted if you try to cover more than one chapter at time. What you're missing is commentary and elbow room, a sense of overall context and practical application. For this you should get the Shupe/Rosser book (Learning ActionScript 3.0) and two or three others.

You might also get Todd Perkins's follow-on to this book, '...Beyond the Basics,' also from lynda. Though more advanced, it recaps this book's material very well, and being a series of short video tutorials is easier to follow. Put both Todd Perkins efforts together, and you get one fine five-star tutorial on how to code ActionScript 3.0.

CORRECTION: When I wrote this I was unaware that Todd Perkins also had a Lynda.com DVD package with the same title. This consists of videos and exercise files and is really excellent, as is its successor, "...Beyond the Basics." If you want to learn AS3, I strongly recommend getting both the lynda.com DVD sets, as well as this book as backup.

I had a really tough time with this book. The explanations are inadequate and often very confusing. I found Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe much easier to understand. This book might be a nice reference for people who have some AS3 under their belt, I haven't tried using it for that purpose, but if you need a way into AS3, this book will frustrate you. Perkins may be good at programming, but a teacher he is not. He's completely out of touch with what it's like to be a creative person trying to learn programming and he has no idea how to bridge that gap. He's a computer geek, not a communicator. Shupe is better.

The Hands On Training (HOT) books from Lynda.com and Peachpit Press has been one of my favorite series for learning new software and keeping up-to-date with new releases of my favorite software. This series seems to continually create the right mix of book and supporting content including exercises and training videos. As Flash gets more robust, this teaching challenge gets more complicated. However, ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional by Todd Perkins will not disappoint you.

With the release of Flash CS3, Flash programmers woke up to the "brave new world" of ActionScript 3.0. You will notice some of your favorite built-in coding features are not supported but some new features make up for the loss. This book starts out, as you would expect, discussing what is new in 3.0 and the major differences between the old and new versions. Then, Perkins begins to build a solid foundation for ActionScript 3.0. Since the book is for both the experienced Flash programmer and those just getting started coding ActionScript, the author covers all of the programming basics such as variables, functions and arrays.

Learning programming for animation and interactivity can be overwhelming. Therefore, Perkins uses a working example which he carries over several chapters. I liked this very much. Because Flash is such a robust product, it is necessary to use partially completed working examples to teach the basic concepts. Using the same example over several chapters helps to maintain continuity as Perkins introduces event handling and how to write code that listens and responds to many events such as mouse clicks, frames and timer events.

Classes are next. Yes, ActionScript 3.0 is an Object Oriented Programming language and has some very nice prebuilt classes that will speed up your programming. Perkins shows how to extend these classes as well as write your own custom classes. He discusses how to add class objects to the Flash timeline and how to work with class paths, external .as files and public/private classes.

Things get a little more interactive with the addition of conditional, compound conditional and loop statements. Next, you go back to school and learn some math. Perkins makes this almost painless when he discusses basic math programming tasks such as generating random numbers. When he adds text and arrays, you are ready to create a word game which teaches you how to dynamically create and style text fields and load external text.

At this point, Perkins starts to tie everything together while creating a more advanced game. He starts with a storyboard to plan the application's decision-making process and the flow of the game. He teaches how to write code that will detect and respond to correct and incorrect answers and determine when to reset or declare a winner.

Todd Perkins is an Adobe Certified Instructor and the author of several books on Flash and web development including Adobe Flash CS3 Professional: Hands-On-Training and ActionScript 3.0 in Flash CS3 Professional Essential Training.

The presentation in this book is brisk and well-written, and new concepts are explained well with every step.

Unfortunately, everything else about the book feels a bit cheap. The same raggy little assets are used chapter-after-chapter. The script examples are small and disposable, never building to anything interesting. There was some obviously hasty copy/replace editing in which "board" has been replaced by "snowboard" or "boarder", making for a few baffling moments.

Ultimately, this is an OK starter book, but it doesn't begin to justify the price, and you'll likely end up looking for something more rigorous when you're done.

This is the first book I have used from Lynda training series. I look at this book more as a training manual than a reference book. This is because each lesson is broken up into chapters and would be difficult to complete the lessons out of sequence. The first half of the book uses the same basic graphic and background to cover various flash concepts. Some may find seeing the same graphics over several lessons rather tedious, but I found it effective. However, the monkey on the surfboard cruising over a wave is a strange graphical choice.
What I like best about the book is how it breaks up the code and explains exactly what is happening. In the beginning of the book it is clearly explained what an Object, Listener, Event Type, Event, and Function name do in the code. All these concept are clearly explained in later chapters. The lessons themselves are on a CD-ROM along with some video tutorials. There is no need to save each lesson since the next lesson begins where the last one left off. Later on in the book more advanced concepts are discussed such a Custom and Math classes. There are other later lessons that involve creating a Text Game using verb and noun arrays, and a dice game that creates random numbers. The final chapters cover Drag and Drop, Collisons Detection, and integrating video into flash. I did find it odd that there was no chapter for creating timeline navigation within flash. However, there is a chapter on creating a button that links to a website.
This book is perfect for somebody with no experience in ActionScript 3. It is one of the few books that explains the basics right from the start. This book is not for somebody with an intermediate or advanced knowledge of the subject matter.

I received my product within a couple days, as promised. The book was in perfect condition. I am a Graphic Design/ Multi Media student and this book is a great user friendly manual. Thankyou

I bought this book and all of the pages fell out about after 4-6 months of owning it and studying it. The content was good though for beginners.