Product Description

If you want to create exciting dynamic web sites that will amaze your online audience, then the Flash platform is a great way to go, with it's many features, including powerful graphical and sound and video capabilities. To really harness the power of Flash though, you need to make use of ActionScript to provide dynamic effects, enable user interaction, and manipulate data.

ActionScript 3.0, the latest version of the Flash Platform's scripting language, offers a lot of new and powerful features. ActionScript is now a full-fledged programming language, with complete object-oriented capabilities, improved event handling, sound and video support, drawing capabilities, support for regular expressions, and much more.

Whether you are a Flash designer wishing to add to your skill set or an experienced ActionScript developer who wants to get up to speed with the latest version, you'll find all you need to know in Foundation ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex.

This book covers all the essential techniques from the ground up, allowing you to get up and running quickly and easily. Starting with the fundamentals, youll learn about using ActionScript objects, manipulating sound and video, and harnessing the power of regular expressions and XML.

The book concludes with two case studies to consolidate what you've learned and to introduce some more advanced techniques. This will give you a good grounding in the new and exciting world of ActionScript 3.0 and show you how it all fits together in larger applications, allowing you to go on and build your own professional sites.

The sensible layout of the book makes it easy to find information about specific techniques. It doesnt aim to be an exhaustive reference, but rather focuses on the essential skills that will enable you to get up and running quicker. With this book as your guide, youll be creating killer Flash applications before you know it.

In this book, youll:

• Use the fundamentals of ActionScript 3.0 with both the Flash IDE and Flex
• Take advantage of ActionScript 3.0's object-oriented features
• Manipulate sound and video to produce exciting modern web applications
• Work with XML as your data source
• Witness the power of ActionScript 3.0 in two complete case studies

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #62550 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-17
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 450 pages

About the Author
After studying theatre in London, then working for several years as an actor in the US, Todd was introduced to Flash in 2000 and was quickly taken by how it allowed for both stunning creativity and programmatic logic application&emdash;a truly left-brain, right brain approach to production&emdash;and has not looked back. He now freelances as a Flash developer in New York City, creating both silly animations and utilitarian applications. His personal work and experimentation can be found at his website, www.27Bobs.com.

No biography is available for this author.

Sean McSharry has been a Flash Developer and Designer since 1999 (Flash 3). He runs the popular Flashcoder blog (www.flashcoder.net/blog). He has consulted in many business sectors from Oil exploration to Banking to IPTV, for major industry leaders such as Microsoft and Adobe Consulting. He is an Adobe Certified Flash Developer and Designer and has worked on everything from banners to massive RIAs. He has worked in Europe and America and is presently the Director of Creative Research and Development for AKQA in New York. He uses the entire Flash Platform in his development (Flash, Actionscript, Flashlite, Flash Media Server etc). He is a pre-release tester for many Adobe products and is actively involved in the Flash community. He strongly believes that Flash Developers and Designers should be as comfortable with and passionate about code as they are about aesthetics and design. \"Flash allows you to bring everything together in one development environment for many platforms. So to produce the best work you need to be skilled in coding, design, video, audio, stills production, etc. Even if you don\'t actually do them, you have to have a good understanding of them all if you want to produce the best work\".

Customer Reviews

Knowing Flash is extremely helpful
I find that one of the hardest things about picking up a tech book is determining the book's target audience, i.e. what do the authors assume you already know? Personally, I've been a programmer for the last 10 years and have been tasked with learning ActionScript as part of a new project. When I started looking at books on the subject, I couldn't find very many AS books that were aimed at developers only without going to a reference manual. I suppose this is a function of AS being intimately related to Flash, but that's just where I was coming from. In the end, I picked up this book because it covered AS and Flex, which I am also picking up.

Before I say anything else, its important to realize that ActionScript 3.0 has a massive API, so it will be almost impossible to do lots of work with it without using a language reference. Anyone learning AS should be prepared for this.

Overall the book is a good one. It does a very solid introduction of the language, including a good overview of object-oriented programming. Maybe it was because I already understood 90% of the concepts, but I found most of AS pretty easy to pickup. Most of the examples are from Flash, which makes it a tad confusing at times if you don't already know Flash. Most of them are not that difficult, so its not insurmountable, however. I had to ask a few questions of some friends who are flash guys to make a few things make sense, but thats not the end of the world. Flex is really only touched on at the end of the book, and its Flex 2 at that.

So, here's my .02 on the target audience issue I mentioned. I would recommend this book to any Flash developer looking to learn ActionScript, or to a programmer from some other OO language (like Java) that knows some Flash and wants to learn AS. It will definitely get you going in the right direction, and when combined with the reference I mentioned will give you a solid foundation. If you are a developer looking to learn AS and/or Flex, I wouldn't recommend this book. There are better books out there that don't require as much Flash knowledge. Its a good book, just not the right one for me.

A very good book
I've benefited a lot from the user reviews on Amazon.com so I figured I should contribute and give back. I have no association with the authors or the publisher. I purchased this book after reading the reviews on Amazon. I am a programmer with

experience in Java, PHP, C#, JavaScript, ASP, Visual Basic, MySQL, Oracle, Sybase, MS SQL Server, and now ActionScript 3.0!

"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 the 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 novice 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 Flash IDE to lay out

their Flash project.

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. Flex 2 does

support ActionScript 3.0.

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. 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 detailed tutorial based 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, C#, 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.

Chapters 4 throug 11 are mini exercises that introduces the reader to ActionScript 3.0 in action. Each excercise is well written. You can also download the source code if you don't want to type in the code examples. I suggest you actually

type in the code. It reinforces your learning. Take time to read the code and actually understand it. Your knowledge about ActionScript 3.0 will be vastly different by the time you complete the chapters.

You knowledge will then be put to the test in chapter 12. Actually, your knowledge will be re-inforced as you build an application that ties all of lessons you completed in chapters 4 through 11.

Chapters 13 and 14 will quickly introduce you to Flex 2. I will probably purchase another Friends of Ed book for Flex 3 and ActionScript 3.0 programming.

I love this book. If you want to learning ActionScript 3.0 from the view point of Flash CS

Fun learning tool
This was not your typical dry reading tech book. The author did a great job of mixing humor into the writing, so that you did not feel like you were trudging through just to get to the end. To me, it helped the concepts stick in my head a little easier/better.