Customer Reviews

ActionScript Cookbook

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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)

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

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.

I've been using Joey Lott's Actionscript Cookbook for the past two weeks and find it to be a great asset for my Flash Actionscript development.

I say 'using', because the cookbook format is intended to be more than a reference (see Actionscript for Flash MX). This book and the accompanying code samples have made it possible for me to move way ahead in my development efforts. The instruction for the code development, coupled with the code samples allows you to start cooking up your own Actionscript code to solve problems for your development requirements.

The range of problem solving covered in the ASCB is perfect, in that it covers most of the range of Actionscript, including managing XML files, Flash Remoting, FlashComm, Shared Objects and Components. Then Joey moves into the sample applications which you can dissect to really get a deeper understanding of what Flash MX is all about.

I've found the writing to be very accessible and it includes important tips on thinking about the way you write your code for re-usability, documentation and mapping out your project strategy.

In summary, I've put about 20% of this book to use and feel sure that it will be sitting next to my keyboard for the next six months until it's 70-80%. I own about four Flash/Studio MX books and wish they were all written like this.

What I might change if I were re-writing it. Skip the 'Basics' chapter at the beginning, although it is well written and many might find it useful, I didn't buy the cookbook for the basics. Second, it would be great to see a chapter on how the typical AS project lead organizes their code, works with remote servers, CVS and tips for creating optimum effeciency by doing x,y and z.

This book is not intended for beginners, but could be used that way if you were willing to dive in and understand Actionscript by dissection. I really think this is a great and unique resource.

This is from a designer-type.

Going from print to the web, Flash5 was easy for me to pick up. After a break of doing no Flash and coming back to it with Flash6 out for a few months, I was frustrated, uptight and bought every Flash6 book I could find by trusted authors in order to catch up, while at the same time trying to get a big flash site done for a client.

Nothing helped. I kept getting more and more frustrated. Everytime I saw the words "call-backs", "this", "method" or "object", I would get knots in my stomach.

Joey Lott not only helped me get the website done, but his Actionscript Cookbook finally got me to understand Flash6 concepts. Flash5-free at last, no more knots in my stomach. I can now read and understand all the other books I bought! Now that Flash7 is out, I'll be buying every title that comes out by Joey Lott. He is the consummate teacher, and includes explains what you need to know, and why you need to know it, in concise, easy-to-understand verbiage.

In my opinion, Joey's Actionscript Cookbook and Colin Moock's Actionscript, the Definitive Guide, and are the best values out there for Flash6.

I received this book 2 weeks ago and have not put it down. The author did a phenomenal job breaking down problems and could not have been any clearer on his solutions to the problem. This is not a how to book, rather it is the friend you're looking for at 3am when nobody else is awake. I have yet to run across something that I couldn't find the answer to in the AS Cookbook! I highly recommend this book to any Flash/ActionScript developer. Thumbs up to Joey Lott & O'Reilly.

Let me just say that I've never been disappointed by an O'Reilly Cookbook. They are always incredibly useful. They don't start from square one, but if you're still learning the language, they're great. This book is no exception. Rather, it's probably the best one I've read yet. It really fills in the missing parts of the language, in fact. If you want a method to submit an entire form to a CGI script, they've got one. The book is full of useful things like that.

My only complain about the book, and this is a minor one, is that the code for the sample applications in the last few chapters doesn't seem to function at all on my Mac - none of them. This is a little bit of a bummer, as I was looking forward to examining the apps as they functioned. But the wealth of practical knowledge that fills the rest of the book leaves me with no option but to give it five stars. If all that code functioned perfectly... I'd have to find a way to give it six.

This book is one of the few Action Script books that specifically covers Flash Communication Server. Using this book I was able to build a chat server as well as a flash movie that could connect to it and have many clients interact with each other.

Good Book!

This book travels almost everywhere with me, along with Colin Moock's ASDG2. Where ASDG2 stops Joey Lott picks up the pieces and assembles them into practical and useful examples that can be directly applied to everyday projects.

The Actionscript Cookbook should be a part of any developers library. Joey Lott's books consistently impress me as I've also found the Complete Flash Remoting to be invaluable to have around.

This book is clearly excellent, once you'll use the files from this book, you will never want to code a project in MX without them, so many usefull actionscript in one place, I just finished reading it from cover to cover.
Even though Flash MX 2004 is out now, I still code all my projects in MX, so this book is really a must have; every subject is covered!