Customer Reviews

Flash 8 ActionScript Bible

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The title of this book is actually "Flash 8 ActionScript Bible". For some reason, Amazon has it listed as "Flash "X" ActionScript Bible".

I am new to the world of Flash and ActionScript, though I have considerable experience in other programming/scripting languages. I was especially interested in harnessing the power of ActionScript for interactive Flash applications, and this book did not disappoint.

- Writing is clear and concise.
- Code samples are well thought out, and highly relevant to the learning objectives.
- Excellent instruction on marrying ActionScript to JavaScript, and vice versa.
- Good coverage of XML(reading in from a file, writing out to a server-side page via querystring or inputstream)

This book is top notch, and I will be VERY surprised if any future reviewers assign it fewer than 4 or 5 stars.

If you have the basics of actionscript down, this book is great. I use it at least once a week for quick reference and code examples. They leave enough margin on the sides of the pages to include your own notes, and the INDEX is awesome.

If you are interested in learning actionscript or are a flash person who mainly creates timeline-based SWFs, DO NOT buy this book. My suggestion would be to head over to kirupa.com and learn from the tutorials. Once you've got the hang of it then pick up this book. It fills in a lot of gaps and answers a lot of questions.

This book is not a learning tool. It is a reference tool for people who have 99.9% of actionscript memorized and need to know if there is a ";" or a ":" on line 912 of their script. If you're a beginner with actionscript you'll be wondering "why do I need to know this?" throughout the first chapters. Lots of script but no real world examples of why you would need it. I'm 3 chapters in and I haven't learned anything practical that I can use to enhance the animations I've already created. I have no idea why they would start the book with cryptic mathematical functions and not start with something basic like play options.

Maybe this is a good referece book (hence the 4 star rating), but for my needs; I'm afraid this book is not going to be helpful.

Thanks again Wiley.

This book is a good reference for people learning ActionScript. It covers many advanced topics, and covers them well. As with most books, you will still have to apply yourself to take the concepts taught in this book and make them work in your project.

I have been a very strong Flash ActionScript programmer for many years. I have taught myself how to program by reading the ActionScript dictionary and other Flash manuals. What this means is that I know most of what Flash can do, but I have to apply myself to know how to combine that knowledge to create the result I want with my applications. Fortunately, I have a great aptitude for this.

Because of this background, I don't typically find many books covering topics I don't already know. Going into this review, I wrote down the expectations I had for this book.

1) teach me how to create and use Classes (a new concept for me)
2) be a language reference that I can use while developing projects

Classes are covered very early, which is refreshing. Since ActionScript is build around so many Classes, it's a good idea to cover creating your own Classes. The book covers creating Classes step-by-step, and walks through adding one feature at a time which makes it very easy to follow.

This book doesn't fulfill by second expectation however. I was expecting that this book would have every ActionScript command documented and give an explanation which would be more digestible than the ActionScript dictionary's. This book doesn't provide that, which isn't a bad thing; it just doesn't align with my expectations.

The book classifies the reader level at Beginning to Advanced... I don't agree with this. I would definitely recommend this book to someone who is already familiar with Flash, and wants to know more about ActionScript.

If your looking for answers on action script and how to easily implement it to flash this is not the book for you. This book gives a good explanation of coding and goes through all forms and ways of coding. I have only made it partially through the book but until i get much further i feel i will just stay confused.

If you are familiar with flash and/or programming at all then this book is for you. Together with the online Flash documentation from Adobe's website, I can find out how to do anything I want to. The book gives great examples of everything that it discusses. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to make killer Flash content.

It's true that it requires a little bit of programming background to understand what this book is saying sometimes but let me emphasize that it takes minimal experience.

If you're a hard-core developer with a background in "real" OOP (not "Object-Oriented-Like" scripting tools such as ActionScript, but rather languages such as C++, C# etc.), then this book is for you. Previously, I bought 3 other books on ActionScript (including "Training From The Source") trying to find one that didn't take the pansy "click here, drag that, type this" approach - I wanted a book that told me "WHY" I should do something and show me the code to do it - no pictures, please, just code. Without knowing why you're doing something, you have just relegated yourself to doing only what others have done before you - you will never go beyond that. This book gives you background on why things are the way they are, when it might change, and what to do in the meantime, and the pros and cons of each choice.

The only weakness I see is that it covers a lot of detail about progamming basics that take up pages needlessly for the more advanced developer. But you can always just skip those sections - those topics make the book more appealing to newbies. I myself did learn a lot about RegEx that I never knew before.

I'm sure this book has other shortcomings somewhere, but I can't see it yet because I'm too tickled to find one that talks directly to folks who don't hold that funky "timeline" thing as the Holy Grail.

Not a book to use if you are casually familiar with Action Scripting, or have only used Action Script in 5 or MX. Almost all examples are functions or object oriented programming, without a layman's definition of what either is. Good reference if you know of a human being or online chat that can explain things to you. Once I become more expert at scripting, this will probably be a good reference book, but by that time we'll have Flash 9 or 10, and all will be moot.

Good reference/learning tool if you lock yourself away in a remote cabin and eat sleep and breath Flash for 4 days.

The book is VERY technical, and puts good use to people who are familiar with technical literature. However, it's examples are poor, so don't expect this book to give you a step-by-step course.

This is a very easy-reading book (Not that easy-reading, of course, as everybody would expect from a computer language book, but you know what I mean). It is not dull to remember you that you should be familiar with the Flash 8 environment before buying this book.
The first part of the book, the Getting Started, has many useful details. Maybe there are more details than the needed at the beginnig. But, when you are starting to miss the practical issues, the book gives you simple exercises that became more complex in a nice way. And you realize that the details were just there because the authors don't want to save words on good explanations and examples.
In the second part, "Using Core Classes", the authors start to complement the contents of the different chapters, what means that they did a lot of work of re-writing and polishing prior to publishing. Also, after each exercise, there is a description telling you why you wrote that specific code. This is an achievement not always found in other books of this kind.
Not all the contents were crystal clear for me and there are more errata than I'd like, but they are not big problems actually.
The book is organized very well, from easy to hard, always remembering the previous issues. I have reached part three: "Working with Display Objects". I am enthusiastic.
In short, it is a great book, very powerful and useful if your aim is to learn ActionScript 2.0. I am enjoying each page, and it is very hard for me not to keep on reading and practicing with this nice guide. BUY IT