Customer Reviews

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!

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"Boing Boing Boing!"

Keith Peters's engaging and readable book on Flash 9, Actionscript 3.0 Animation is quite unusual for a programming techniques book. It assumes you know very little, but it ends up being an authoritative work of lasting value.

Notwithstanding the "3.0" in the title, this is the second edition of "Making things Move," updated for Actionscript 3.0. The first version sold very well, but I think the second edition will open up Flash to a much wider audience.

This is because Peters almost always gives you two or three ways of doing something, and this extends to whatever Flash development environment you have chosen. There are three ways you can write Actionscript 3 for Flash: The Flash IDE (which you get when you buy Adobe Flash), Flex Builder 2 (which you get when you buy Adobe Flex Builder) and the free Flex 2 SDK (which you get when you download Flex SDK free from the Adobe website.) I use the third environment, so I really appreciate that "Making Things Move" tells you how to set up "trace" for debugging in the free Flex SDK environment. Because of the popularity of Flash animation, and the fact that the book tells you how to use the free development environment (and the fact that Actionscript 3 is so great), I think this book will be both popular and influential.

So, I found nuts and bolts information in the very beginning that was probably worth the price of the book even if I didn't animate a single bouncing ball, but what's the rest of the book about? Three things that everyone learned (or should have learned) in school: trigonometry, physics and how to think about stuff on your own. And you get it an applied context that basically gives you everything you need to build, and to understand how to build, an interactive 2D or 3D game -- except fancy graphics, of course.

User interaction, moving objects around, collision detection (two or three different methods), how to use acceleration and velocity for springing and easing, billiard ball physics, how to make things walk (forward kinematics) and reach for stuff (reverse kinematics), plus rotate collide and move in 3 dimensions, it's all in the book. All completely comprehensible. Various ways of placing things randomly on the screen, how to bounce back after colliding, how to swarm objects and connect them to each other? All covered. Matrix math, Brownian motion? Covered and explained. About the only thing Peters doesn't give you is the rotation matrices for four-dimensional graphics, but to be perfectly fair, nobody else does either.

This book is a product of tons of experience and thoughtfulness. Each technique appears to be so simple -- certainly there isn't too much code in any one example -- and yet along with each technique, it seems like there's at least one little `gotcha' that Keith Peters tells you how to avoid. In other words, you can scan the book quickly to see what's in it, to see what's there and examine the formulas, and then when you go back and read it, you also benefit because you pick up one of these 'gotchas' or an explanation of why one way is better than doing it another way.

Will you find this review useful if I don't complain about something? Okay! Well, in the spaceship example in chapter 5, which uses the keyboard, nothing works unless you click on the window first. The book says nothing about this, or how to prevent it. Can you set the keyboard focus onto your movie without clicking the mouse on it? I wish I knew.

Less important, in nearly every code example in the book, the constructor of each document class calls an init() method, which Peters says is a recommended "best practice" I would like to know why this is a best practice, since it just makes the code (and the book) longer and (ok, just slightly) more time consuming to read.

Lastly, everyone knows (or will know after reading this book) there are two kinds of animation, frame-based and timer-based. What I never realized is that there's a third form, time-based animation, that's smoother and more accurate than either frame based or timer based. Plus, it's immune to the frame rate of the movie, the motion stays just as smooth and constant as you have intended it to be. I really appreciate the fact that the book brought this to my attention, but why did the author wait until page 505 to get around to it? No matter, you're crazy if you don't read every page, from the beginning of the forward ("This is a book about art"), right to the very end of the index ("zero, dividing by zero in Flash").

This book is packed with useful information from beginning to end and will give you many happy hours and things to do on long winter nights in front of your compute; the very last example in the book, slipped in as a final parting gift just before the recap of all the book's equations, tells how to add the "Boing" sound to the bounce of your bouncing ball, in just 3 lines of code.

If you don't have any books on Actionscript 3, I think this is probably the best one to start with until the Moock book comes out, if you have an interest in animation.

First off, the previous version was the best actionscript and or graphics book for the Flash environment I had ever read. Useful segments of script and the practical approach to getting common graphics, animation, collision, 3D and kinematics work done were invaluable.

My criticism of the current edition is that, with the exception of placing everything in a class structure for actionscript 3.0, the new edition lacks novel content. There are no new techniques, projects, nor animations. Also, the programs may be written in classes, but often the programs don't take advantage of the object oriented techniques encouraged in 3.0 actionscript.

The parts about using the Flex SDK are interesting as they allow people to program in actionscript without having to buy anything. It is pretty obvious that this book was written before the Flash CS3 version came out as it would be more aptly named "actionscript animation 3.0 for flex" as some of the techniques necessary to make graphical objects in the flex environment are inconvenient for those using Flash CS3.

So, my bottom line:
If you don't have this book and want to program graphics in flash/flex, get this book before all others.
If you already have the previous edition, don't bother upgrading. (though for me it didn't work out too bad because I used the previous edition so much I wore it out.)

For animation and programming outside the Adobe Flash interface, this is one of the best books I have read. It starts out with an introduction to concepts that apply across the board for animation and then continues on in to physics based animation and eventually 3D programming. While the book uses ActionScript as the primary language, the concepts it employs easily translate into other graphical programming languages.

Something to keep in mind when you order this book is that it will not teach you how to use Adobe Flash. While "Making Things Move" is very applicable to this program, it is geared more towards Flex Builder 2 and the Flex/AS 3 command-line compiler and Flex 2 SDK (the last two of which are free from Adobe's website at the time of writing this review).

If you are looking for a book that will help you get started with Flash-based game development, this is a great book to use. I would consider it an excellent resource for both novice and advanced users.

If you are looking for a book on developing sites that interact with databases or send and retrieve online data, this is not the book for you. Instead I would suggest The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0.

Another resource I would reccomend for any Flash developer is ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers, which is good for just about anything else "Making Things Move!" and "The Essential Guide" don't cover.

I was eagerly awaiting this book because of the good reviews, but I've had lots of problems getting his code to work.

He uses old AS2 keywords in examples as user created function names, but this causes errors. I had to look online to find out that solution. There was nothing on the "Friends of Ed" site.

Next, the drawing example he gives on page 64 did not produce the arrow it was supposed to produce. I am new to this level of coding, so some of my problems may be my lack of experience, but it's tough to learn if the code examples don't work.

I wish the Friend of Ed would post some corrections and/or help. I'm sure that the problems I've had with the book are because the author was using a development version of AS 3.0, but they should get information up about the issues.

This book is an excellent resource for flash animation for AS3. Saying that if you have the previous version of the book for AS2 there is no need to purchase this book. All it does it show you the same formulas; but in objects. If you don't know about objects and different aspects of OOP for AS3 then i recommend this book Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential). This book takes you from beginning to end of AS3. If you want to learn animation though then this book is it when it comes to AS3.

I have programmed in AS since Flash 5, and I have read many AS books. This book is an overall average. Its for those who know a little about AS and Flash. If you are totally new to AS, then the books coding in the first chapter will really frustrate you. There are minor coding problems in the first chapter, and the author has a bad time explaining basic definitions. However, its later chapters are overall good, and I enjoyed the book.
I would say: Buy the book if you can stand some frustration and some (minor) unclear explanations. For $25, it's a bargain.

This book is full of problems, especially if you are using CS5. I had to go to google to find this out, as the companion site does not contain any fixes. I downloaded the files from the site and did a simple copy/paste to try and find my problem. The code from the site does not even work!

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation Making Things Move!
by Keith Peters
Publisher: Friends of Ed
IBSN:-13 (pbk):978-1-59059-791-0
Copyright 2007

Review by: Linda Weller

I highly recommend reading this book even if you don't know what this (!) is. The book, similar to it's AS 2.0 counterpart. Keith Peters does a very good job of explaining the AS 3.0 language in a simple encouraging way. After hearing him say "this is really simple" about 1000 times during the book, you start saying it yourself.

Math, Physics, Trig, Pythagorean Theorem in Flash -- no problem, easy not like your college Physics course. If effects or game ideas is what your looking for you can find them here.

On of the best things talked about in this book is in the foreword by Arial Balkan. He explains that today programmers are artists and designers are ActionScripter's. Bravo!!

He starts with programming basics. How to use Flash with in the Flex format is not covered in this book. Keith is your personal mentor, he is really rooting for you. He knows you can do it and shows you how easy it really is.

First you learn how to make classes. Then he moves on to Rendering Techniques (using the drawing API)

His philosophy is to give you class snippets and let you combine them into your own projects and games. Your goal being, to see how many of these classes you can combine. He goes on to explain basic motion incorporating such concepts as velocity, acceleration, friction and moving objects around.

In this book, it's all about the Greeks. He introduces the section on Easing and Springs with an explanation of Xeno's Paradox. Keith tells you which hit test to use with which shape. "How do I bounce something off of an angled surface?" The answer is here. As you have probably guessed, "it is not that hard."

Then moving on to bound checking with getBounds. Next, there is the section on billiard ball physics and mass momentum. Each well explained section of the book is supplied with downloadable code samples and simple formula explanations. Following that he delves into particle attraction and gravity, the slingshot effect, and "g" forces. He throws out a few game ideas for you to explore along the way.

The book then covers Kinematics (making things walk), and 3D animation and, learning to locate things in virtual space. The great part about the code he gives you is that it just builds on itself as you read through the book. As he progresses, he adds the new items in bold allowing you to quickly scan the page and see what is new. As you near the book's end, you have almost memorized the rest of the code. And if you haven't the last chapter holds the formulas for all the chapters that you have just read to reinforce your learning and as a quick reference.

If you're new to AS 3 and have some kind of OOP (Object Oriented Programming) experience in your past or none at all then this book is right up your alley...an experienced programmer may find this book a little simplistic. Anyway, I've always had a problem understanding programming concepts because I could never apply them to real world applications. All through college while taking JAVA, VB, PL/SQL...etc I always felt like I never truly grasped some of the basic concepts that made up OOP. The way Keith Peters explains his examples and some of the more basic concepts that make up AS 3 is awesome. I've been able to couple his explanations with the stuff I've learned in the past to really help clarify some of these more basic OOP concepts that I could never quite grasp. Since AS 3 is a lot like JAVA, I have a really good jumping off point for doing some really cool things with this language. This book has really lit a new fire of excitement in me for OOP that was long lost back in school. I really enjoy this book and the way the author uses real world terms and normal "speaking language" to write the book. It's as if he's speaking to you in person and explaining things to you face to face.

I have one CON to all of the PROS. The book needs a resource CD with the code chapter by chapter. I know, I'm lazy. But sometimes it really helps to compare my code that I may have problems finding the errors in with the correct code just to see if it's my code with the problem, the class path I have setup, an author error or maybe even something else. Regardless the book is well worth the money I spent and I'd recommend it to anyone.

Keith Peters has written another excellent teach-yourself book pertaining to Actionscript. I also have a copy of his Foundation Actionscript 2.0 book. I am only half way through the book as of now due to my reading several other books concurrently with this one, but it has already taught me a lot. Keith Peters teaching style is easy reading, with humor and taught by examples which are easy to follow and comprehend. I highly recommend this book to anyone first learning Actionscript and to those of us familiar with Actionscript 2.0 transitioning to Actionscript 3.0. There are significant changes in Actionscript from versions 2.0 to 3.0 and Keith Peters clearly lays them out.
The only negative I give the book, and it is a small and correctible problem, is there exists conflicts in the book's examples prevently the examples from running correctly. Specifically, I refer to the names given to the mouse handlers in the examples' functions; e.g. the function name "onMouseDown" conflicts with the Actionscript naming conventions preventing examples using that function name to run or to run without error. This I easily corrected by renaming the function "onMouseDown1." I did the same with "onMouseUp" changing it to "onMouseUp1" and this corrected all such errors.