ActionScript Cookbook [Paperback]

Joey Lott (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2003

When you need to get the job done fast, you'll reach for this practical, nuts-n-bolts toolkit. Rather than focusing on ActionScript in the abstract, this Cookbook puts theory into practice with ready-made answers to common ActionScript problems. Flash MX developers can solve issues quickly, while learning practical techniques for resolving similar dilemmas in the future.

ActionScript has blossomed into a large and important language whose sheer volume of capabilities can be daunting. The ActionScript Cookbook breaks it all down into tasks that are relevant, practical, and insightful. Appealing to the budding coder as well as the experienced ActionScript jockeys, this book offers new perspectives and approaches to ActionScript development that will empower all developers.

This O'Reilly Cookbook complements ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition by providing quick solutions to common ActionScript problems. This book trades on our respected "Cookbook" approach, which provides a worked-out script for every problem addressed. You can use these "recipes" to solve an immediate problem, and then explore the issue further in The Definitive Guide when time permits.

The ActionScript Cookbook contains over 300 recipes on a myriad of topics. Here's a sampling of what you'll find:

• Drawing shapes at runtime
• Controlling movie clips programmatically
• Accepting user input and manipulating text strings
• Accessing audio and video via Flash Communications Server
• Working with Flash Remoting to connect to back end databases
• Using record sets with data grids
• And, much, much more in over 20 recipe-laden chapters...

This Cookbook's logical progression from short recipes for small problems to longer, more complex scripts for thornier riddles allows developers to link modular ActionScript pieces together to create rock-solid solutions for Flash applications. If you prefer to see larger applications instead of atomic recipes, this Cookbook has a kicker -- seven full chapters of sample applications including:

• Building a Flash Paint Application
• Creating a Video/Chat Message Server Application
• Creating an MP3 Jukebox
• Creating a personalizable MyPage Application

The ActionScript Cookbook is for people who say, "I understand everything in theory, but I don't know where to start in practice." This book is all about practice.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joey Lott is the author of Complete Flash Remoting MX as well as the co-author of the ActionScript Bible. Joey has been teaching Flash and ActionScript since 1999 when he first began training throughout Southern California. Joey has professional experience in the Internet industry beginning in 1996 including co-founding RightSpring, Inc. and consulting for YourMobile/Premium Wireless Services (J2EE B2C application) and Ads.com (leading the development of a J2EE B2B application).

Product Details

• Paperback: 869 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1 edition (June 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596004907
• ISBN-13: 978-0596004903
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,640,791 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars extremely helpful, even under Flash 8 / AS2, January 13, 2006

By 

Argie (La La Land) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ActionScript Cookbook (Paperback)

The Actionscript Cookbook is an extremely useful resource for aspiring and veteran designers. I've been designing/developing since Flash 4 and I still found this book very insightful and full of great hints and explanations.

A decent book for beginners but better for intermediate to advanced developers and designers. I'd recommend Colin Mook's Actionscript for Flash MX (also by O'Reily) which explores more fundamental concepts in Actionscripting 1 which are still pertinent in many cases to AS2.

I appreciated the code examples, although admittedly I think I did remember finding a few errors, however the errors were on the nitpicking typo level and I usually found after getting annoyed thatI hadn't written the code correctly.

Their example on Storing Persistent Shared Local Objects (flash cookies) was particularly useful.

Well organized and clear (and no, I'm not affliated with O'Reilly, lol)

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars warning, June 29, 2005

By 

Markdesign "flash developer" (los angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: ActionScript Cookbook (Paperback)

this is a great book but it will not work with macromedia mx 2004 unless you set the export setting to flash player 6.

I got this notice from the author himself.

mx 2004 cookbook should be comming out in september 2005

~mark

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Code Examples Work Well, December 26, 2003

By 

Bruce A., Epstein (Rocky Hill, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: ActionScript Cookbook (Paperback)

As the editor of the book, please allow me to respond to two inaccurate reviews...

In response to C. A. TBF's review of May 26, 2005 ("Too Many Examples DO NOT WORK"), I'd suggest he contact O'Reilly tech support (booktech (at) oreilly.com). As you can tell from the other reviews, other readers are not having the same problem. The code examples have all been thoroughly reviewed and the few errata are posted on O'Reilly's catalog page for the book. The code examples work. The reviewer must have forgotten to do something basic, like give a name to a movie clip using the Property inspector. If he writes to me or O'Reilly, we'll gladly help him solve any problems.

In other news...I have to take issue with the anonymous, 3-star review of December 23, 2003 entitled "An OK book for programmers"

A single book can't be perfect for every level of reader, but the near-unanimous 5-star reviews tell us we did a pretty good job. Certainly, there are occasional examples that mirror things that can be found in the documentation, because we strove to make the book as complete as possible. But I'd strongly disagree with the reviewer's statement that "A lot of the examples are obvious explanations of the AS documentation." The vast majority of the recipes are neither obvious nor found in the documentation.

Likewise, it is true that how to loop through an array should be known by skilled programmers, but the book also targets Flashers less familiar with ActionScript. Not every recipe is intended for every reader.

Lastly, the reviewer says that "Seemingly usefull [sic] functions, like recursively stopping everything in a MovieClip, are missing." Whereas it is true that the book cannot possibly cover every scenario, Recipe 7.10 describes how to recursively traverse the movie clip hierarchy to access nested clips. Furthermore, Recipe 7.3 discusses how to control playback, including stopping a movie clip. Any skilled programmer, as the reviewer purports to be, could easily combine those two techniques to achieve the desired goal. Had the reviewer written to O'Reilly or the author for technical support, we would have gladly clarified the situation for him (or her).

As a matter of principle, I have never before reviewed a book I've edited, but I felt obligated to point out the inaccuracies in the preceding review. Please forgive me, but I think the book is worth all of 5 stars.