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

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #245888 in Books
• Published on: 2007-12-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 450 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781590598153
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

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.

None Available

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\".

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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.

Really good book - with some room for improvement
Boy I was loving this book until chapter 7.

The Video project in that chapter is pretty complex, although the author (Sean McSharry - author of Chaps 7 & 8) keeps telling you what a simple example it is. Sadly, in chapter 7 there are several typos and some that I *think* are typos but can't be sure of. The downloaded source didn't work either. I switched the publish settings from 'Adobe AIR Player' to 'Flash Player 9' and that worked while I was at work. However, my files that I've created while at home (my 2nd attempt at getting this to work)are not responding to the same fix. I've spent hours looking at the book and my code and his source with no luck. There is a book site with an errata, but there isn't really anything there that helps with this issue.

That's the bad news. The good news is that up until that chapter, I was following everything and everything worked as it was presented in the book.

That said, if you want to pick this book ONLY to gain understanding of the capabilities of Video in AS 3 (I don't know why you would...maybe you like to throw money away at a whole book for one chapter, what do I know?)- I'd skip this and find some good tutorials online on the subject.

I'm in this book till the end as I'm using it to prepare for my Flash CS3 cert and I feel like, in general, it's helping me. I also tore through Friends of Ed's Foundation Actionscript for Flash 8.

Bottom Line: Flawed but worth the money if you want to put the effort into it.

ActionScript for both Flash and Flex
Like most of the friends of ED books on Flash and ActionScript, this book by Steve Webster, Todd Yard and Sean McSharry is a good book for the novice. Most beginner's books on ActionScript cover just the basics such as variables, loops and functions and don't go much further. However in this book, the authors go one step further and help the readers to extend their ActionScript skills for both Flash and Flex.

The authors first discuss the development process for building an ActionScript project and dissect a simple bouncing ball example. The next chapter covers ActionScript fundamentals including variables, data types and constants. As you move on to objects, classes, inheritance and other aspects of OOP, you take a look at a sample iPod project.

The most interesting topics for me are the visual aspects of Flash. The authors cover everything from the Display list to movie playback. But they don't stop there. Next, they delve into the Graphics class and the drawing API. As you build a drawing application, you learn the essentials such as how to use ActionScript to draw line strokes and shape fills.

Next, you learn the aspects necessary for building interactivity in Flash including events, listeners and the event flow. You apply this knowledge of event handling to build a video player and along the way learn about displaying and controlling video in Flash. Moving on to audio, you build an MP3 audio player.

One of the most important aspects of any programming language is the ability to streamline a project or projects with reusable code. In Flash, that means components. The authors cover components starting with building a framework for UI and video components to skinning the finished components.

Now you are ready for advanced topics such as regular expressions, XML and E4X parsing. Over the last few chapters, you build an RSS reader application in both the Flex 2 SDK and Flex Builder 2. Then, you expand the functionality of this RSS reader with ActionScript.

Steve Webster works as a developer at Yahoo and has contributed to several Flash-related books. Todd Yard is a software architect at Brightcove in Cambridge, Massachusetts and has contributed to several Flash-related books. Sean McSharry is an Adobe Certified Flash Developer and Designer and a prerelease tester for many Adobe products.