Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential) by Colin Moock
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Book Reviews of Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential)
Book Review: Best Book on AS
Summary: 5 Stars
This is hands down the best book on ActionScript. It sticks to true O'reilly style and there is not an ounce of fluff in this massive book. This book is meant for Beginners to ActionScript, not beginners to Object Oriented Programming. If you have a background in Java (and/or Swing), you will love this book because a lot of UI programming in AS is similar to Swing (the Observer pattern, the layout managers etc are similar). If you are brand new to programming understand that this is not a simple script learning book - it digs into dynamically modifying object behavior at run time, that is not even supported in Java and C#.
The first part of the book deals with core AS - the usual stuff - control structures, functions etc. But beware - if you are new to AS, do not skip anything in this book. This book covers interesting twists even in the most banal of topics, like iterating arrays. Although I am familiar with namespaces in Java and C++, this book really takes namespaces to the next level and talks about how program flow can be modified using dynamic namespaces. Of course, I really did not understand how this approach is better than interfaces, it is something AS supports and you must understand if you are doing AS and that this book competently explains.
There is information available on the internet on AS, but you will come nowhere near to how much you will really learn from this book. Even beyond AS, it takes your OOD understanding to the next level and deals with concepts that will help you understand advanced JavaScript (Prototypes, function enclosures etc).
This book is worth its weight in gold.
Book Review: Like the name says: Essential
Summary: 5 Stars
Essential. That sums it up.
This books is a excellent book when dealing and understanding AS3. If you have come from various other programming languages like Java, C++ or any object oriented programing language you will understand the first 5 chapters easily. The rest of the book explains and gives examples of various other aspects, of the language that you will use when developing with it.
I also purchased ActionScript 3.0 Bible and like I said for that review both books are great but some times one does a better job at explanation on various topics then the other.
In the Essentials you have the option of going through the book and building an example program as you understand more concepts. This is great for beginners coming into programming if this is your first programming language. If you are not a beginner the book is kinda self explaining, which is great when building a project.
Please be aware that this books does not means explain how to use flash or flex. The sole purpose of the books is to teach and understand ActionScript 3.0. This is the programming language that the Flash 9+ supports. If you are looking for a book on how to develop in flash or flex I suggest a actual book targeted at flash for flex. Know this though if you are a excellent ActionScript 3.0 developer you can do almost anything in flash and flex, which would take twice as long in the their respective IDEs.
Book Review: Excellent resource, teachers shouldn't complain!
Summary: 5 Stars
I've been an Actionscript programmer for many years. This book an incredible resource for developers who know Actionscript 3.
To teachers and those thinking this is too complicated... it isn't. Actionscript 3 is heavily object oriented, and if you considered yourself experienced with Actionscript 2 without knowing or using object oriented programming, then you don't really know Actionscript 2 either!
This covers tons of questions, the only problem is that there needs to be a new edition to include/reference current open source projects utilizing Actionscript 3 (APE, Box2D, Papervision, ASWing). It'd also be nice to know how to hack SWF files a bit and actually manipulate sound (as Andre Michelle has done). More application examples using ByteArray would be a nice addition too, as ByteArray has become a very powerful AS3 component for advanced flash applications.
Overall, this is an excellent resource for those who are familiar with Actionscript 3. It's not a great textbook for a class unless the teacher is familiar with Actionscript 3. It's clearly written, concise, and is not "too technical" as other reviewers have claimed.
If you don't understand Actionscript 3 it's probably because you don't understand object oriented programming and design. You're probably used to timeline based development and timeline based code (which isn't a bad thing, but it doesn't make you fluent with Actionscript 1, 2, or 3).
Book Review: "The" Flash Resource for Programmers
Summary: 5 Stars
Chapter 29 was fundamental and contained the information I could not find described anywhere else.
If you are a programmer familiar with other languages, and you are accustomed to using the index of a manual to find out all the information that you need about a new language, then this is "the book" to use to start learn Flash; and Chapter 29 is the first and only Chapter to read straight through.
Why? Because if you are a programmer, you are going to find actionscript easy. There will be some things you need to know about the language; and the index of this book will lead you right to any such information. But the thing you are really going to want to know is how to get your actionscript to be run.
I looked "everywhere" for the information about how actionscript is bound to Flash and there were two problems in my way. First, Flash is targeted at designers more than programmers. Consequently, the focus of Flash "how-to" materials is on creative people trying to animate something. In these materials any use of actionscript is a distraction -- an incantation that is mentioned and glossed over rather than explained. Second, I could not find keywords to get the information on the web.
Chapter 29 fixed all that for me. It is a bottom's up explanation of Flash that talks about the Flash basic constructs and how actionscript is bound into these constructs.
Book Review: Great for complete beginners
Summary: 5 Stars
I have been using this book to learn what I can about ActionScript. At my job I work closely with several programmers who work very much with ActionScript (as well as PHP, HTML, and JavaScript). I wanted to understand better everything that was going on, and I wanted to learn how to do simple fixes with ActionScript myself, so I bought this book. I have been 100% pleased.
I have very little programming experience. (I learned HTML in 8th grade so I could build my own web-page.) This book does an EXCELLENT job of explaining, from the ground up, class and object oriented programming (which is handy not just for ActionScript, but for many other languages as well). My one caveat is that having an extensive background in computers is good, as well as having someone who DOES know ActionScript who can answer your questions. While everything is in the book, it is covered at a fast pace, and you could possibly get confused if you're started literally from scratch. But then again, that's basically what I did, and I love it.
This is a great book for beginners to programming in general, but would also make a GREAT book for anyone who is just new to ActionScript. Definitely 5 stars. I would recommend to anyone.