Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 [Paperback]

Kristian Besley (Author), Sham Bhangal (Author), Eric Dolecki (Author), David Powers (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590596188 | ISBN-13: 978-1590596180 | Publication Date: April 10, 2006 | Edition: 1

ActionScript is the native scripting language of Flash. ActionScript knowledge is essential within the world of Flash design and development, as Flash remains a leading tool for cutting-edge interactive design and development.

ActionScript is what gives Flash its power, but with that power comes a certain level of complexity, which can be intimidating. This beginners’ book, significantly updated since the last edition, covers all of the basics of ActionScript using version 8 of Flash. The skills acquired by working through this book will enable you to move on to more advanced friends of ED books, such as Foundation PHP 5 for Flash, Foundation ActionScript Animation or Foundation XML for Flash.

This book contains all you need to understand and make use of ActionScript, and to have some fun while learning. The Foundation series teaching style is ideal if you're a non-programmer who wants to learn Flash programming quickly and thoroughly. The authors teach the basics, and provide an all-around proficiency in ActionScript, as well as Flash components within Flash 8. You’ll gain the practical skills to build ActionScript based Flash projects, including making initial design decisions, structuring code, and testing. An ongoing case study means that by the end of the book, you’ll have constructed a cutting-edge Flash site to showcase your newly learned skills.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Kristian Besley has worked with multimedia for three years, but has been creative with computers for much longer. He currently develops Flash-based material within an educational environment. This material includes interactive presentations to illustrate how scientific things work, as well as graphical user interfaces and tools allowing web-based content creation with basic computer skills. He was a contributing author on the seminal Flash Math Creativity, and many other friends of ED books. In 2002, he launched the world's first bi-annual HTML markup-based TableArt competition. The competition was an unbelievable success.

Sham Bhangal has worked on books in new media for five years, during which time he has authored and co-authored numerous friends of ED books, including critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling titles like Foundation Flash, New Masters of Flash, Flash MX Upgrade Essentials, Flash MX Most Wanted, and the Flash MX Designer's ActionScript Reference. He has considerable working experience with Macromedia and Adobe products, as well as other general web design technologies (such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.). In addition to speaking appearances at FlashForward, the biggest Macromedia Flash developer conference, Sham has also been a beta tester for Macromedia and Discreet products for a number of years.

A bio is not available for this author.

David Powers is an Adobe Community Expert for Dreamweaver and author of a series of highly successful books on PHP, including PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. As a professional writer, he has been involved in electronic media for more than 30 years, first with BBC radio and television and more recently with the Internet. His clear writing style is valued not only in the English-speaking world; several of his books have been translated into Spanish and Polish. What started as a mild interest in computing was transformed almost overnight into a passion, when David was posted to Japan in 1987 as BBC correspondent in Tokyo. With no corporate IT department just down the hallway, he was forced to learn how to fix everything himself. When not tinkering with the innards of his computer, he was reporting for BBC television and radio on the rise and collapse of the Japanese bubble economy. Since leaving the BBC to work independently, he has built up an online bilingual database of economic and political analysis for Japanese clients of an international consultancy. When not pounding the keyboard writing books or dreaming of new ways of using PHP and other programming languages, David enjoys nothing better than visiting his favorite sushi restaurant. He has also translated several plays from Japanese.

Product Details

• Paperback: 648 pages
• Publisher: friendsofED; 1 edition (April 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590596188
• ISBN-13: 978-1590596180
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #951,374 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I specialize in writing about web design using Dreamweaver, PHP, and CSS. PHP is the most popular server-side language that brings life to websites by communicating with external data sources, such as databases, news feeds, and XML documents. Adobe has recognized my expertise in web development by appointing me an Adobe Community Professional (ACP) for Dreamweaver. You'll often find me giving help in the Dreamweaver forums and Dreamweaver Community Help. In 2010, I became one of the first to qualify as a PHP 5.3 Zend Certified Engineer.

Before turning my hand to writing about web design, I spent nearly 30 years as a BBC radio and TV journalist, working both in front of the microphone/camera and behind the scenes. That gave me a wealth of experience in explaining sometimes difficult concepts in straightforward, easy to understand language - experience which shows through in my books.

I spent a large part of my broadcasting career in Japan, first on loan from the BBC to NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation, and later as BBC correspondent. I have traveled all over Japan, and love taking photos, many of which end up being used in my books. Over the years, I have worked closely with the Shiki Theatrical Company, Japan's leading producer of musicals; and have translated several of their plays into English.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than an Actionscript introduction!, September 20, 2006

By 

Jody Hall "Mazoonist" (Redding, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 (Paperback)

Although this book is ostensibly a "beginner" book on Flash Actionscript (no previous programming experience necessary), I got more out of this book than you can imagine, and I'm not done with it yet. I've already got a few favorite pages that I come back to again and again.

What struck me right off the bat was that this book wasn't code-heavy, but had much more in the way of explanations than most books, which was exactly what I have been seeking for a long time now. Then, as I got into it, I realized this book was changing my whole way of thinking about coding with Flash Actionscript, and it's because of their heavy stress on "modular" coding techniques. The authors call it "black box" programming and making "building blocks" of code. It's really encapsulation. Whatever you want to call it, they back it up with solid examples. The demonstration of the apply() method on pages 360 and 361 was alone worth the price of the book!

On pages 308 and 309, there's an example of making a movie clip containing video controls that you can just drag and drop into any movie, and bingo! you've got a set of controls for that movie (play, stop, pause, fastforward, rewind). Again, the idea is that if you build something once, you should be able to reuse it, with minor tweaking here and there.

Chapter 10, Games & Sprites, is really cool! There's a fully functioning "zapper" arcade-type video game with a complete explanation of the rationale behind how something like that is designed and coded, and what variables should be global, which ones belong on _root, and which should stay local to each object (All of the examples in the book can be downloaded from the publisher's website, BTW. In fact, you can download the examples even if you haven't yet bought the book).

Although a lot of the stuff in the earlier chapters is very basic, taking you through stuff like variables, arrays, loops, conditionals, etc, the stress on modularity is woven throughout. The main idea that you come away with (certainly the central idea of the book) is that it's worth the time it takes to design and plan something modularly. Even though at first it does take longer, in the end you wind up with something that's WAY easier to modify.

Now, I say all that from my own perspective, and I'm probably an intermediate level programmer. So maybe the stuff I'm saying about this book and it's stress on modularity would be old hat to a pro. I don't know. Then again, I've got about 8 books on Actionscript, each one having stuff unique to itself, and this one has things in it that just aren't to be found in the others.

All through the book, there's also an ongoing project for building a modular Flash website. I haven't gotten into working along with that yet, but I'm sure I will eventually (I've had the book about a month). In any case, they add a little more to the project at the end of each chapter, so that it progresses into more advanced stuff at about the same pace as the rest of the book.

There's a basic introduction to classes and oop in the last chapter. It should be understood that it's not extensive, and that's not the focus of this book anyway. It does tie in with the stress on modularity, and there's good explanations of when and how you might use classes in your programming. But if want material specifically about classes, there are other books that make that their focus.

To sum up: I would recommend this book for beginner to intermediate programmers. Although much of the stuff in the earlier chapters will probably be a rehash of what you already know, the stress on modularity is there from the beginning, and there is good material throughout. If you've heard about modular code and code reuse, but never really seen good examples of it, open this book to some of the pages I mentioned above (308, 356, 360, 361, 364) and see if any of it registers an "aha" moment. Also, if you're looking for a bit less code and lot more explanation about techniques, get this book.

I also recommend "Foundation Actionscript Animation: Making Things Move" by Keith Peters, from the same publisher.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book for Beginner on up ...., December 5, 2006

By 

H. Abreu "stormvisions.com" (CA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 (Paperback)

I am a current animation student in California and Flash is one of the tools we are using. While I have developed some proficiency animating in Flash, the scripting tends to turn my brain to mush after a while.

I picked up Foundation Flash 8 to learn some of the basics and have been using Foundation Actionscript for Flash 8 to gradually explore scripting. I am not a programmer but got through the first few chapters easy enough. The second half of the book is somewhat tougher but but filled with interesting chapters -especially the game chapter (chapter 10).

I haven't quite cleared the hurdle of the later chapters, find them more challenging, but I keep the book on my desk to pick at stuff. It is well written and comprehensive. From my perspective as a non-programming 'art head' I'd say it covers beginner to advanced level topics by the end of the book; that's pretty cool because many books seem to be simple rehashings of the product manuals designed to part you from $40-$50 while giving you no new info.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A diamond amongst coal., December 1, 2006

By 

Paul M. Carlberg "Consumer" (Denver, Colorado) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 (Paperback)

As an old UNIX hack I have read quite a few programming manuals, from the original C (Kerninghan & Richie - when it was new!), to the present. Very few, if any, (including the O'Reilly series), have come close to being so informative, easy to read, and enjoyable as the 'ActionScript for Flash 8' book. I consider myself a poor programmer partly because I never found 'print Hello World!' that interesting. In any event, this book has taken me from rank Actionscript beginner to (dare I say it...) semi-advanced! Basically, cannot recommend it highly enough! For me, I enjoy the graphical nature of Actionscript and I am glad I finally found the right book to take me there. I think beginners and experienced Object-Oriented types will get a lot or something from it. Thanks Friends of ED!