Customer Reviews

Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript 2.0

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

 

 

This book has the MOST amount of technical and coding errors I've seen in an ActionScript book in a long time (not the worst--ISBN: 0072222662).

I've tech-edited two other Flash books and I'm thinking the tech-editors of this book should learn ActionScript before they attempt to tech-edit their next book. Or at least read it before sending it off.

They just had to come out with this book before Colin Moock came out with his or else no one would buy it.

The Author, Jeff Tapper, is sick of getting emails about how bad this book is and he said it was a fiasco from start to finish so I'm thinking some marketing jerkwad rushed the book out the door.
More bad desicions in the marketing department end up wasting some more time and trees.

Save your money.

i was leery about buying this book from the seemingly negative user reviews it received, but i went ahead and did it anyway. i was surprised at the number of blatant spelling errors and the multitude of examples that did not work. i did get a lot of practice debugging actionscript, though. if you don't want to spend time fixing author errors and reading confusing, misspelled text, then don't bother buying this book.

I got this book to learn more about OOP style programming and for the most part that what it does. If you really want to have a good primer for actionscript oop programming this is the book. The down side to the book is all the errors and the section with the XML does not give all the code you need for the drop-down menus (unless you download the fla). If you are not great at debugging the author's code, be prepare to be frustrated and disappointed. I can't give this book a high rating because of all the errors but for reference alone and coverage on basic OOP structure I have to give it 5 stars. Anything after chapter 5 its slim picking for good and valuable code. Maybe Jeff Tapper should have waited to write the book after Collin Moock put out his so he can see how to write good code. With that aside the book is uh....ok.

I hate to be another person to mention the large amount of typos and poorly formatted code, but I can't help it. It truely is as terrible as everyone says.

I have past programming and Actionscript experience, so it's pretty easy to pick out the errors in the code examples. So, I'm hoping that the author's updated downloadable code will help me feel better about spending money on this book.

Currently I'm about 200 pages into the book, other then typos and poor code formatting, the book seems like it might be a good primer to help me get started. If they do a second edition of this book they should definitely take the time to explain what's happening in the code in greater detail. Some of the concepts and examples leave you wishing that there was another paragraph/page or two about what was done.

This is my first New Riders book and if this is what I should expect, it will definitely be the last. The editors at New Riders should be ashamed.

I feel bad for the authors; it sounds like they're taking the heat for all of the negative vibes surrounding this book, when in all likelihood the responsibility lies with the editors and/or publishers. It definitely smacks of "get it out the door quick" marketing.

I won't mention the atrocious code samples in the book (it's true...they're horrible. At least the downloadable codes seems to have fixed that -- thank you, authors).

I won't mention the spelling and grammar mistakes (again, though, it's true...the editor(s) must have just verified that the manuscript was, in fact, about ActionScript and called it good).

I will mention that I found the book generally useless. To be fair, I read Moock's Essential ActionScript 2.0 first, which I personally found much more informative and worthwhile. I followed it up with OOPAS2, thinking that I could only solidify my OOP knowledge, but would up feeling that it was a darn good thing that I read Moock's book first, or else I would have been totally lost in OOPAS2. I just don't feel that the book is well organized or that it presents ideas effectively.

At some points conepts are belabored until they bleed, and other concepts are just sort of casually mentioned and never heard from again.

The example files and exercises aren't exactly useful. Contrast that with Essential AS2, which provides a useful class for nearly every full example. Let's see, from Moock you get an design pattern frameworks, an ImageViewer, a Logger, and several other rather useful class files. In OOPAS2 you get a Loan application and a Magazine subscription application.

To make another comparison with Essential AS2, that book closes with an excellent introduction to Design Patterns, which was the first time MVC made sense to me. OOPAS2 doesn't talk about Design Patterns.

OOPAS2 does spend the middle third of the book talking about XML, Web Services, Flash Remoting, and Flash Communication Server. Those are all extremely great things to talk about, but the connection to Object-Oriented Programming was weak at best. That whole section just seemed tacked on. In all, it did the book a huge disservice by taking pages away from "real" OOP stuff, and consequently trying to cram a huge thing like FlashCom or Remoting into a single chapter. Come on...write a book on Remoting, don't shove it into a book on OOP.

I need to stop an remember that there were actually a few redeeming qualities about the book, but they are far outweighed by the negative qualities.

If you can only afford one OOP for AS book, make it Moock's book (I haven't read the new OOP for Flash 8 book from Freinds of Ed, that one looks worthwhile, too). I wish I could even recommend getting both, but really, the book is so scattered that it's really not worth it. If you're serious about OOP, you won't care about the middle section too much. And if you want to learning Remoting and the like, then you're much better off buying a dedicated book(s) on the subject. And the last section where they build the sample application is just, well, "eh." I rarely don't finish something that I start, but they just lost my interest in the last section. I couldn't see any point in actually building the app that they were building.

Go with Moock's book or the new Friends of Ed one (hopefully).

Long wordy explainations, limited examples and just plain not enough useful information. After reading my copy of the Actionscript for Flash MX book by Kerman, I expected wonderful things of this book. Knowing that Actionscript was totally rewritten and was going to have a learning curve, I expected a book similar to Kerman's in the fashion of starting simple and working up to advanced. Instead, the book was littered with verbose explanations and poor examples. At just under 500 pages (the online page count is wrong), this book simply gives an overview of the language. It does do a decent job of focussing on Object Orientation and the techniques involved, but given the limited number of books available on the language of Actionscript 2.0, I just expected more.

If you are new to Actionscript 2.0 and have a limited background with programming, this is not the book for you.

Having minimum Flash/AS1 experience, but years of web dev (javascript/css/etc) experience I found this book to be an excellent launching pad. The first three chapters summerized the new syntax very nicely. Its not a language reference, but still very useful and inspiring. Even gets into OO design priciples and an example OO project.

There may be typos and errors in the code, but for a solid introduction to OOP in flash you can do a lot worse than this book. The concepts are addressed logically and intelligently and it provides a great framework for incorporating OOP into your actionscript. I regularly recommend the book as a great introduction to the subject.

First, let me say that I think the technical editing on this book is an atrocity! It seems as though the Courier-fonted code presented in this book was cut-and-pasted from a mish-mash of sources. The formatting and even coding style differs from one listing to the next, even within essentially the same programs! I think that's terrible. It's rather difficult to learn the material when your examples are awful and full of mistakes. For shame!

Secondly, the book is really expensive, and a lot of the space is wasted on server technologies that many people cannot possibly afford. The typeface could be a little smaller, especially on the code, and more good stuff could be fit into the book.

Thirdly, the website listed on the book is WRONG! So I cannot download ANY of the code examples. Nor has New Riders / Peachpit bothered to mention this on their site. They list only TWO mistakes in their "errata," which is so wrong it's not even funny.

I wish that authors, and editors in particular, would put more effort into proofing a book before sending it to press. In my opinion, writing a book is not like putting out a piece of software. It's much harder to offer "patches", especially with an unwilling publisher and uncaring authors.

However, the material in this book is, for the most part, very good. I appreciate its timeliness very much, but I think a lot more effort should have gone into the later stages of production!

As an OO programmer I found this book provided a clear and concise skills migration path that has helped me get up to speed with a new language in short order.

If you are an OO programmer looking to add Actionscript 2.0 to your resume, this is the book for you.