This book is totally unlike other books on ActionScript, and that is both its strength and its weakness.
First of all, the claim that this book could be used by someone with no knowledge of programming is laughable and misleading. Chapter One goes through all of Object Oriented Programming, including such arcana as page 22's "Access-control modifiers for instance variables." No one without programming experience can understand why or how this woud be useful or learn how to use it. If you haven't done programming, choose a different book.
Other books begin with the Flash environment, and introduce bits of ActionScript on the timeline in an inductive manner:
on (press) {
amountPaid = Number(paid.text);
amountOwed = Number(owed.text);
}
You'll see none of that in this book, except for Chapter 29, which introduces programming in the Flash environment. None of the code sits on the timeline--this is ActionScript as a programming langusage, with packages, and stand-alone code files.
On the positive side, this book really does explain the language as a language, so for us programmers, there's no need to wonder about syntax, language features, error handling, etc.--it's all here. You'll learn how to create objects with their own events and listeners, about dynamic instance variables, about using try...catch...throw...finally error handling, and many other features unlikely to be covered in other books on ActionScript.
Because ActionScript is specific to Flash (and Flex), the book does cover the events you'll care about: mouse activity, key presses, screen updating, ENTER_FRAME vs. timer, stage resizing, loading, and so on. It provides excellent information on sandboxes and security I did not know and does a good job of dealing with text fields from a programming perspective. So it does cover much of value in the Flash context, and that in more detail than other ActionScript books I've read.
In summary, I find this more of a reference book than a tutorial. For the topics it covers, it goes into great depth. If you are a game developer or are writing a major application, you need this book. On the other hand, if you want to develop simple Flash programs and want to buy only one book, this isn't it. It won't teach you the simplest basics (putting stop(); on frame 1 of a movie clip) that you need for practical Flash programming. As a reference, however, it's indispensible.
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