Customer Reviews

ActionScript: Your visual blueprint for creating interactive projects in Flash CS4 Professional

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

 

 

I am currently trying to learn AS3 and this was one of the first books I bought. I bought it because in a cursory way, the book seemed to begin by quickly moving into OOP and I thought it would expand on the subject from there. But frankly the strength of this book is it's weakness. It treats every subject at the most basic, most simplistic, easy to understand way possible, but never every goes into any depth.

Essentially if you have never programmed before, and want a quick reference guide to extremely basic syntax, this is a good choice. If you are looking for something that goes into any depth, and has coding examples that are longer than 5 lines long, get something different. And if you are looking for something on AS3 Object Oriented programming steer very very clear because this book has absolutely nothing on the subject beyond one preliminary chapter, and a few other minor references.

I agree with an earlier reviewer. The screen shots are teeny...essentially impossible to read, and much of the step by step code is also quite small and difficult to read, as well. Whenever I want to use this book, I have to bring a magnifying glass with me. I have written to the publisher complaining of the unreadability, and was sent some of the screen shots as jpgs, so at least I can look at them on the computer screen while looking at the book. But I've found this to be really cumbersome and often it is inconvenient. Had I realized that the print was going to be unreadable before purchasing the book, I'd have never bought it in the first place.

There are also some coding errors; in some instances, when trying to use an example from the book, and even the unmodified code that I actually downloaded from the book's website (and did not change), Flash complains that the code contains errors; trying to figure out what is wrong in each sample time consuming, since the in the book the author insists that all the code works great...but it doesn't and But Flash begs to differ. It's a standoff, and the reader learns nothing in the process.

I wouldn't recommend purchasing this book, though I think in its simplicity, it might have been a good choice for action script beginners had the print been readable and the code been debugged before publication.

This book has a lot of good information in it. It's MAJOR drawback, which makes you want to chuck it, are the microscopic screenshots of the examples.

I wear reading glasses as it is, and these screenshots of the examples make this book almost worthless to me.

I would've paid more for a larger formatted book. I guess these guys wanted to make it on the cheap.

I don't recommend this book.

The book is the best ActionScript Book I have found - as far as format - it is so easy to thumb through and learn with each topic broken into little pertinent boxes. As a designer/developer I am very impressed with it - and I have bought a ton of books in this and related technical fields. Don't let the cover design fool you - this is a wonderful up-to-date source for learning all about AS3 - no kidding.