Customer Reviews

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects (Foundations)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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This book is one of my favorite Actionscript books. The author writes in an understandable and clear way. The examples are on topic and clear in the understanding. The book covers a wide variety of different aspects in the use of image effects and image processing in Actionscript 3. The target audience are definitely not for beginners or coders new to Actionscript, but for coders with medium or more advanced level. This book is definitely worth your time to dive into and gives you a lot of new ideas. For instance, what you can do with your web-cam, images or other visual projects. One part of it I really like is the explanation of the mathematical aspect of this topic. I wish my math teacher would have explained it as well as this book ;)
I haven't finished the entire book yet and I'm exited to read the rest.

I began reading Todd Yard's ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects as a text book, starting on page one and going through it chapter by chapter. After a few chapters this way I found that I wanted to skip around more to specific effects or classes that were of particular interest to me.

I have no reservations whatsoever in saying that I think that any ActionScript developer interested in applying image effects and manipulating bitmaps programmatically should have this text on hand. It is filled with thorough explanations of such processes.

My issue with the book is that I don't feel that it works well as a text book or as an instruction manual. Certainly if one were interested in applying a particular effect or gaining a better understanding of a specific method for manipulating a bitmap, instructions for these things can be found in this book. However, I feel that Mr. Yard's explanations of some of these things could be written out in a way that was easier to grasp at a first reading.

Throughout the book code samples are presented that relate to the classes & functions being discussed in that chapter. On several occasions, although I had been able to follow along up to that point, the block of code presented would slow the pace of my reading considerably. Rather than having the code commented along the way, leading the reader through the code as they read it, an explanation of what is being done by each part is generally presented in the text after the code block, meaning the reader has to read the code, and then go back and forth between the explanation and the code again to fully grasp what is going on. Sometimes no explanation of what the reader would see if they were to view the resulting swf is readily offered, which seems to assume that the reader is looking at and outputting the code samples in the Flash API at the same time, which many of us are certainly not doing.

While this may seem a major criticism of the book, I think that I would like to re-emphasize my initial take on the book, which is that it is an essential reference book, very thorough in its explanations, even if fully grasping at a first read them may have taken a bit more than I would have liked.

Adobe Flash has many uses....animations, web sites, components, video playback, RIA, etc. One of the really cool things Flash is good at with the introduction of ActionScript 3.0 and some cool new features of Flash CS3 and CS4 is Image Effects.

Image Effects range from shapes, filters, pixel manipulation, movement, and 3D animation. There are lots of Flash books on the market now that cover many things, but this is the first book I've seen that focuses primarily on that topic. You would think that there would not be enough topics to fill an entire book, but you would be wrong.

The author (Todd Yard) discusses every aspect of this topic from the drawing API, filter and blend modes, bitmaps, bender and shaders, 3d animation, text and video effects and much more.

The audience of this book (as stated by the author) is anybody you has familiarity of Flash and ActionScript. So if you have some experience using Flash (a recent version) then you should be fine.

Of course if you have an artistic background (which I'm guessing most readers of this book will have) it will help even more as well as a knack for programming.

That being said, the author explains each topic succinctly with very easy to comprehend examples in each chapter. The author never assumes anything from the reader and explains exactly what he means with sufficient explanations. Since there are so many topics and sub-topics within this book, it could be easy to get lost as you read from beginning to end, but the author makes sure you are guided in the right direction and reviews what has been covered before briefly to make sure the author and reader are on the same page.

Since the topics can get rather technical and verbose, the author has mini-examples that he builds upon each chapter so you can get an idea what each section can be used with and how it could be used with your existing flash projects.

One of the most interesting chapters in this book (Chaper 6) covers 3d animation which is covered with objects of Vector3D and Matrix3D and really makes it look so interesting compared to regular 2d animation. Another really interesting chapter (Chapter 10) is video effects. The author talks about the cool things you can do with video and flash on the web. Flash is the standard with playing and manipulating video on the web and the author goes through cool examples such as building a video loader, filtering video frames, adding effect to specific frames, isolating colors, highlighting colors for a comic book effect, and so forth. This topic alone will really inspire to learn more about flash and effects.

I could go on and on but you need to read the book yourself! It's a great book for anybody who really wants to understand why and how you can perform all kinds of image effects in flash.

If digital image manipulation is like painting, then this book is like listening to a painter describes a desired artistic effect, using Actionscript as a set of brushes, the classes as a palette, and Flash as the canvas.

More a creative workbook than a by the numbers tools tutorial, the many examples can be studied on their own, after a basic review of the drawing APIs. The author makes life easier by opening up some libraries after some additional preliminary background is covered.

The largest portion of the book (about 20 percent) is on bitmaps and bitmap data, which ultimately has to do with pixel manipulation, and the many and varied ways that can be done.

The book's 628 pages are organized into 12 chapters, along with an Appendix that shows how to setup Flash, CS4 and FlexBuilder to work with ActionScript3. The relatively deep Index makes it fairly easy to quickly locate topics of interest.

Example code, organized by chapter, can be downloaded, with each having both Flash and Flex project folders. There are a few errors and typos that, while not intentional, help the reader's debugging skills. However, some of AS3's `newer' constructs, most notably the Vector class, do not work with Flex3, but do with Flex4, which is still in Beta as of this writing and has a few wrinkles of its own.

While this book is not for beginners, it can serve as a good reference for studying how creative effects can be realized using AS3. ActionScript 3.0 Bible

This book is densely packed with valuable information and code for image effects. It also has an excellent chapter on Flash 3D. I own a lot of books on Flash. This is one the very best I have seen. It is an invaluable resource for serious ActionScript programmers.

i'm very glad i bought this book. it gives you a great jump start for solid comprehension.

Earlier than expected delievery - product in excellent condition. I'll definitely use this company again.