Macromedia Flash MX 2004 ActionScript: Training from the Source [ILLUSTRATED] (Paperback)

by Derek Franklin (Author), Jobe Makar (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Sure, you can use Flash MX 2004 without being a master programmer, but as any Flash developer worth his or her salt will tell you, you're not tapping all of its power unless you're taking advantage of its scripting language "ActionScript 2.0" which offers a more robust programming model and better object-oriented programming support than ever before. Here to take the fear factor out of learning it are Flash veterans and best-selling authors Derek Franklin and Jobe Makar, who demonstrate that scripting is an instinctual process you already know by translating real-life activities into ActionScript scripts. In these pages, you'll find methodologies and techniques for building over 40 real-life Flash ActionScript projects, including sample games, --- applications, Web sites, and more. New in this edition are coverage of ActionScript 2.0, Web services, Components, Printing, Video, and more. On the companion CD, you'll find all the project files and images you need to complete each project.

About the Author

Derek Franklin is director of derekfranklin.com, a resource dedicated to helping developers worldwide get the most out of Flash. He's been involved in Web design since 1995, having served as a multimedia director for a nationally recognized media company. He is the author of Flash 5! Creative Web Animation and coauthor of Macromedia Flash MX: Creating Dynamic Applications by Macromedia Press.

Jobe Makar, who specializes in games and applications programming, is co-founder of Electrotank, Inc., where he is Senior Game Developer. He is a contributing author to Macromedia Flash MX: Creating Dynamic Applications.

Product Details

• Paperback: 776 pages
• Publisher: Macromedia Press (November 29, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321213432
• ISBN-13: 978-0321213433
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 7.9 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #555,558 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last, I get it!, January 22, 2004

By	Philo Yeager (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews

For years I labored to teach myself scripting of various kinds. As resources in that endeavor, the O'Reilly books were impenetrably dense and the "Dummies" books were so slight that I didn't feel like I was learning anything I could build on.

Then Flash came along, and in a couple of years Actionscript was added. I felt my way through some simple scripts, but still I couldn't cross the threshold into scripting anything particularly useful.

With this book, Derek Franklin and Jobe Makar have launched me across that threshold by helping me to learn Actionscript AND to understand it. By the time I had reached page 116 in this 764 page (the Target Paths chapter) I had already learned more about scripting from these pages than I had EVER learned from all the other books I've read on similar subjects.

I imagine that the only training sources better than this $45 book are the online courses which can run into the hundreds of dollars per course. As a layperson, if you want to learn Actionscript you would be well-advised to spend time and money on this book.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A very good learning book for starters, but..., April 10, 2004

By	Christian Ruehl (Darmstadt, Germany) - See all my reviews

I really enjoyed reading this book and following its tutorials. Being a programmer with strong OOP background for more than ten years, I found the book very helpful in learning Flash MX 2004 actionscripting. It covers many important features of ActionScript 2.0 and shows how to apply those features to projects, including some techniques on testing/debugging your scripts. The tutorials are kept simple but interestingly enough to demonstrate the relevance to real-life projects. The text is written in plain english, allowing even non-native readers (such as me) to follow the text.

However, there are some downsides of this book (you can't have everything in a single book ;) ) that prevented me from giving this book a five star rating:

- the book basically is way too much focused on the procedural approach of actionscripting. Due to the very simple nature of the tutorials included in this book, it is fine to put functions here and there. Real-life projects however tend to become much more complex, and I doubt that reyling on functions (most of them put in a single frame) will do the job very well. So I had expected the second half of this book (after introducing OOP) to arrange the scripted functions into classes and showing how to employ OOP to keep your projects maintainable. Just calling methods on classes from within functions isn't very OOP-like.

- the new UI components of Flash MX 2004 are covered not very well. There's just one chapter dedicated to UI components and those are used only sporadically throughout the book. In particular, I missed tutorials on how to create UI components and a chapter on how to subclass UI components that come with Flash MX 2004.

Besides that, the book is worth the read if you are a ActionScript beginner (such as I am) and will definitely get you on the road to becoming an ActionScript expert. If you are already familiar with ActionScript 1.x then this book may contain not enough new "food" for you, so you better stick with the documentation provided by Macromedia. Knowledge of programming concepts certainly makies it easier to follow and understand the samples in this book. If you are totally new to (OOP) programming, you should read a good (OOP) programming book first before taking this course in ActionScript 2.0.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flash a Java GUI programmer can understand, January 21, 2004

By	Jinjyaa (CT, USA) - See all my reviews

I'm a professional graphics programmer, most recently via Java applets. I tried to learn Flash 5, and dropped it because I couldn't see doing real simulators with it. But with MX 2004 and ActionScript 2.0, the programming model is finally to the point where I can get all the power of Flash animation and vector art, small downloads and excellent browser support & deployability, without sacrificing object-oriented programmability, plus gain outstanding server-side integration capabilities. Still, I was finding it a really steep climb up the learning curve with Flash MX 2004. I'm not the only one - I've spoken to other Java & OO programmers who despaired of the paradigm shift to Flash. But then I got this book. Now it all makes sense. Virtually every one of the 50+ beautifully designed and programmed examples gives a huge leg up on the learning curve. I've been programming for 25 years, and this is one of the best programming books I've ever read. If you're a programmer, and want to learn Flash, get THIS book. :)