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Foundation ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex |
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Written by John Tang
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Sunday, 25 May 2008 |
 Foundation ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex by Steve Webster,
Todd Yard, and Sean McSharry is a very good book. It is definitely
worth its price. The authors provide interesting facts that make the
book interesting to read. For example, did you know that ActionScript
3.0 is based on ECMAScript Edition 4? This fact is not going to make
you a better programmer but they do make the reading more interesting.
The authors have a good sense of humor. They inject some funny lines to
make the reading less boring. Let's face it technical books can be very
dry.
The humor makes the reading a lot less dry. Here's a sample:
"So, far you've created an IPod class and creaetd an instance of it, but we've already discovered that it's completely useless as it is. It's like an annoying socialite factory capable of churning out an endless parade of celebrity wannabes who are famous just for being famous, despite being completely devoid of both substance and talent...."
"Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes -- properties."
This book targets novie ActionScript 3.0 programmers and designers. There seems to be two camp of Flash users: designers and programmers. You can do quite a lot with Flash using only the time line, scene(s), resources in the library(movies, graphics, buttons,...), and some simple scripts. However, the real power of Flash is harnessed with the use of ActionScript 3.0. This book is targeted to those individuals who want to move beyond just using the IDE to lay out their movie.
I have one warning. The book covers Flex 2. Flex 3 was recently released. I'm sure the concepts are applicable to Flex 3 but the newer features of Flex 3 are obviously not covered. Hopefully a new editon of this book will cover Flex 3. If you plan to use Flash CS3 to program ActionScript then this is a mute point. The authors state that the book is geared more towards Flash CS3 ActionScript 3.0 programming with bonus coverage of Flex ActionScript 3.0 programming.
I highly suggest you read the help files that come with Flash CS3 before you read this book. You should know about timelines, frames, movies, scenes,...before you read this or any other book. Get the basic concepts out of the way first.
I know I will be looking at other Friends of ED books after reading this book. I will be a life long fan of Friends of Ed if any other there other books are as good as "Foundation ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex"
Chapter 1 walks the user through the creation of a simple application to demonstrate the power of ActionScript 3.0. This is a demonstration chapter and not a learning chapter. Type in the code and watch the movie execute. The author promises to clear up any questions later.
Chapters 2 and 3 get into the grit of ActionScript 3.0's syntax and object oriented programming. These are the hardest chapters for a person not exposed to OOP. If you have C++, Java, or worked with OOP before then this chapter is a quick review. Don't skip the chapters, though, if you have previous OOP experience. For example, the implicit getter/setter methods are not available to Java. C# and Visual Basic programmers will be familiar with this syntax. The following code is an example of an implicit getter.
CLASS DECLARATION
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package {
public class Student {
private _socialNo: String;
public Student(ssn:String) {
_socialNo = ssn;
}
public function get socialNo():String {
return _socialNo;
}
}
}
CLASS USAGE
-------------------
var wizKid:Student = new Student("000-00-0000");
trace(wizKid.socialNo);
Chapters 4 - 11 cover a lot of material by introducing tutorials that cover a specific subject. The tutorials require about an hour and a half to cover. Do a few tutorials a week you will get a good grasp of ActionScript in short time. Make sure you stop and let each chapter sink in before proceeding to the next chapter. Below is a list of subject covered in each chapter's tutorial.
* Chapter 4 Working with the Display
* Chapter 5 Creating Vector Graphics with the Drawing API
* Chapter 6 User Interaction and More with Events
* Chapter 7 Working with Video
* Chapter 8 Using Audio
* Chapter 9 Working with Components
* Chapter 10 Regular Expressions
* Chapter 11 Using XML
You will then put all of your ActionScript knowledge to use in chapter 12. You will perform a tutorial that builds a dynamic image viewer. This is very good way to learn in my opinion. The author walks you through short tutorials and then binds all of the tutorials together to build a useful application that you can actually use on your web site.
Chapters 13 -14 are little out dated. They introduce Flex 2. To the authors credit, the goal of the book is to cover ActionScript 3.0 with Flex coverage as a bonus. At the time of the book's publish, Flex 3 was not released yet.
Practice is the best way to learn a craft. This applies to many activities from athletics to programming. This book does a good job of introducing the subject and then allowing the reader to practice her new found knowledge. It is very much like a course book that a college professor would use except it's reasonably priced. Money spent on this book is well spent if you are new to Actionscript 3 and Flash. It was the first book that I have read from the Friends of Ed series. I plan on reading more books from the publisher starting with "Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation Making Things Move".
Good luck and happy reading.
About John Tang
John Tang's college roommate convinced him to go into IT since
computing was his passion. He studied Applied Mathematics at UCLA but
always had a love of programming. He worked at a research lab on the
UCLA campus where he learned Fox Pro, SQL, and local area networking.
His first "real" job was at Ernst & Young where he did mainframe
programming with Cobol and client server development with Powerbuilder,
Sybase. He has been working as a web programmer since 1999 starting
with Java, HTML, JavaScript, and Oracle before migrating to PHP and
MySQL.
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