Customer Reviews

ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition

5 star:		(42)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I bought Colin Moock's previous book (on flash 5) the day it was released because as an investor of many other sub-standard flash books, I knew the one from O'Reilly (the book's publisher) would be the most valuable. Without fail, "Actionscript: A Definitive Guide" blew me away. Not only was his book extremely informative, but his writing style was conversational, concise, and accessible. Though I had experience with actionscript, my background wasn't in programming, so it was nice to have an "in" to the advanced features of actionscript with Moock's example scripts and corresponding explanations. After a few months of employing the ideas and concepts found easily in Moock's first book...I felt like I finally had a firm grip on Flash 5...

Then Flash MX was released. Immediately I bought it and quickly transitioned myself into the new work enviornment (love it). Then I read up on all the new features...and thought to myself...I wish Colin would write a book for Flash MX's actionscript...it is way more powerful...and more complicated...

He did. It took longer than my patience would have liked...but the wait was well worth it...and the book explains its own delay...IT IS HUGE. Almost twice the size of the first edition...and that's because almost every chapter is edited, has new important explanations and the same easy-to-understand commentaries and examples. Indeed there are entirely NEW chapters...that specifically discuss new immensely more powerful Flash MX actionscript features. Also, all the appendices are new and updated (I frequently use them).

If you own Flash MX and you want to be a serious flash developer with serious marketable skills, BUY THIS BOOK above all--it is a REAL REFERENCE tool--something you will keep on your desk next to your mouse. Nothing is left out except some add-in features (like comm server and UI components) which you can get plenty of info on at macromedia's website. You can also frequent colin's website (moock.org) where he posts hundreds of additional tips, book errata info, and flash downloads.

I garentee "Actionscript for Flash MX" will become the best investment you made outside of the Flash MX application itself...at least until flash 7 is released! If you learn the concepts in this book, you will be able to create anything you or your client can imagine. In the end, that could mean lots of money or lots of fun...or both! Enjoy!

And by the way...buy it at Amazon...it's almost 20 bucks cheaper than the bookstores.

This book is primarily an obvious purchase because of the extremely cretinous policy driving Macromedia's manual publications. Much of what is in this book belongs in Macromedia documentation.

Like all reference texts (really dictonaries for language learners) this book is not for beginners. Unless you have some experience with program design, you are unlikely to learn how to assemble even a reasonable suite of code from the text. That's not a criticsm of the text - it just isn't written for that market.

Almost every language construct gets a piece of exemplar code to illustrate calls and side effects. Even the OO side of things, such as it is in Actionscript, gets played out.

This is a fine book and the sheer labour involved in fiddling with every function is a credit to the author's resilience.

If you are actually programming in Actionscript rather than merely mooning over the nice Flash UI, then this book will be very useful.

This edition of "ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide" is truly definitive. Its language reference alone has almost doubled, when compared to what featured in the previous edition. A lot of new methods, classes, objects, and properties have been added. Also, there are hundreds of new code examples which simplified the latest techniques of Flash MX: thus making tasks like: how to create reusable components, draw circles, save data to disk, preload variables and convert arrays to onscreen tables, more understandable.
This book is really superb. Its beauty is that it analyzed every aspect of Flash MX tools, including all the undocumented and misdocumented features.

Extremely readable book. I'm a graphic/web designer with plenty of non-scripting experience with Flash. I've had several failed attempts at learning programming/scripting (Perl, PHP and Javascript, primarily) so many of the basic concepts were familiar to me. For me, perhaps tying the scripting in with something I already know well will be what I need to retain the material. Time will tell.

My only wish/want/desire for this book, and this is picking at nits, is to have more to do - more exercises - especially for some of the more complex concepts. I was not inspired to replicate every little chunk of code embedded in the explanations and test it in Flash. Through some of the longer stretches (esp. between the first and second versions of the quiz exercise) I found my eyes glazing over a couple times. But I'm still giving this book five stars because the Language Reference (over half the book's 1000+ pages) will prove to be invaluable over time, I'm sure.

I've been using Flash now for about three years and have got more and more into the programming/development aspect. I'm an active part of the Flash communities and had heard a lot about Colin through the forums, which prompted me to buy his book. I consider it a must for anyone who is serious about developing applications within the Flash environment from the very beginner to expert. His style of writing makes it easy to quickly get to grips with even the most complicated areas of actionscript 1. I always keep the book within arms length of my computer as the thorough language reference section regularly provides me with not just ways of doing things, but explains best practices and why.
I have bought quite a few instructional books particularly relating to Flash and this is the best by a mile, it makes the price tag seem very good value indeed.

I've bought quite a lot of books, some better than others, this one has it's position right next to my work computer. I cannot remember everything, and this book provides an excellent source of reference, as even now although I've read it many times and understand the concepts, the finer points sometimes need completion. This reference section covers just about everything. - I'd give it a "must have".

Excellent book for experienced programmers, but if you don't have any programming experience, this book will drive you away.
This book has a lot explanations on conceptually theories but very lack of hands on examples.
If you want to learn how to use Flash effectively and fast, this is not the book.
If you want to take it to the next step (which will be a tiny step compared to what flash can already do without action script), then this book is excellent as it teach a lot of the basic and has a lot of reference.

I am lucky I am an experienced programmer, so I give it 5/5, but if I am not an experienced programmer, I will give it 1/5 only.

Experiened programmer, I mean if you know any of the VB, C++, or Java.

The quickest way to summarize how valuable this book is to me is a quick story. We had a fire alarm at work. I grabbed my cell phone, my jacket, my palm, and this book. Everything else stayed. I credited the first edition with helping me graduate. It is so highly thought of in the office that we fight over who gets which edition. If you find yourself getting ... with some ActionScript thing, buy this book. You won't be disappointed. I can't count how many times I spent hours trying to figure something out and then found out how to get around it within 10 minutes with this book. It is a tremendous reference.

As a flash developer, I can't praise this book enough. Though I've used the Macromedia Actionscript Reference that came with Flash 5 since its release, when Flash MX didn't ship with a similar paper manual, I struggled with the Macromedia electronic actionscript reference for a while, and ended up purchasing this book. I was pleasently surprised at how much better Moock's reference is. All the notes, examples, and bugs for each entry that simply can't be found in Macromedia's version make this book indispensable. I estimate from the 'bugs' sections in the reference alone, I've saved myself a hundred hours of wasted time and frustration. Beyond the reference area, this book contains 17 chapters of content that even the most advanced actionscripters could learn a thing or two from. Seriously, this book is worth its selling price many times over.

This book is a gem. For new-to-programming or experienced programmer alike, this book will be undeniably useful.

Colin teaches you how to program in Actionscript. Infact, little in this book can be simply copy and pasted into your project... That's the beauty!

Unique flash solutions as with anything, created by fresh, intelegent minds with an appreciation of the tools they have to work with. Colin teaches you the subtle aspects of Macromedia Flash and it's powerful scripting language.

He uses generic programming terminology and introduces and explains them for the new programmer. This is very, very important for new programmers who wish to move themselves at some point across to another language.

Since leanrning Actionscript with Colin (Beginning of 2003) I have moved into learning PHP/MySQL. And thanks to Colin I can happily browse through the functions list or the language reference and have a pretty good idea what I'm reading.

Not for the unthinking-quickdraw type, this book is for thinkers and I give it 110% for optimising the time you spend reading/studying it vs. the results you get.

As for myself, productivity on generic flash websites has doubled, and the quality of the websites has also. Actionscript is developing with each release of Flash and will turn from being a designers-only tool to a programmers-who-can-design tool.

So all you designers out there - get studying!