ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional [With CDROM]

by Todd Perkins

When Flash Player 9 released in June 2006, it introduced the new scripting language, ActionScript 3, which has already taken hold in the Adobe Flex application development community. In its latest... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321293908
• ISBN13: 9780321293909
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Lynda.com
• Length: 363 Pages
• Weight: 1.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 7.6" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Great for getting stated with 3.0

If you want to ease into using ActionScript 3.0, consider Todd Perkins' book, ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional (Lynda.com). Despite being for CS3, it is perfectly useful with CS4. It provides a very simple and minimalist approach to using Flash with ActionScript. It does not expect you to know much of anything. It does not go into depth about abstract programming concepts; it covers just the basic critical components for a Flash presentation. (For the abstract concepts, see Colin Moock's Essential ActionScript 3.0.) I found this book really useful for getting started. I'd used 2.0 but 3.0 has significant differences. I don't have a lot of time to really explore the subject, so this book is just right. The only complaint is the habit of providing keystrokes for both windows and MAC. It is great the first few times, but after about 300 iterations, it gets annoying. The book includes a CD with lots of files and includes videos.

The best AS3 book for a beginner

The author takes you step-by-step through useful examples that make the learning flow very easily from basic to intermediate. The style is crisp, with just the right amount of humor. Perfect to get your grounding if you are just getting into ActionScript 3.0

Very Useful

I am a regular user of Flash, however ActionScript (other than the really basic stuff) has always been a mystery to me. This book helped me to understand it in a way I never thought possible. I highly recommend it.

Great Tutorials

A great way to learn ActionScript 3.0. I've read several books on ActionScript and this one by far is the best. It successfully builds a knowledge base chapter after chapter and can give any user skills to apply the ActionScript into their own projects.

Right mix of book and video

The Hands On Training (HOT) books from Lynda.com and Peachpit Press has been one of my favorite series for learning new software and keeping up-to-date with new releases of my favorite software. This series seems to continually create the right mix of book and supporting content including exercises and training videos. As Flash gets more robust, this teaching challenge gets more complicated. However, ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional by Todd Perkins will not disappoint you. With the release of Flash CS3, Flash programmers woke up to the "brave new world" of ActionScript 3.0. You will notice some of your favorite built-in coding features are not supported but some new features make up for the loss. This book starts out, as you would expect, discussing what is new in 3.0 and the major differences between the old and new versions. Then, Perkins begins to build a solid foundation for ActionScript 3.0. Since the book is for both the experienced Flash programmer and those just getting started coding ActionScript, the author covers all of the programming basics such as variables, functions and arrays. Learning programming for animation and interactivity can be overwhelming. Therefore, Perkins uses a working example which he carries over several chapters. I liked this very much. Because Flash is such a robust product, it is necessary to use partially completed working examples to teach the basic concepts. Using the same example over several chapters helps to maintain continuity as Perkins introduces event handling and how to write code that listens and responds to many events such as mouse clicks, frames and timer events. Classes are next. Yes, ActionScript 3.0 is an Object Oriented Programming language and has some very nice prebuilt classes that will speed up your programming. Perkins shows how to extend these classes as well as write your own custom classes. He discusses how to add class objects to the Flash timeline and how to work with class paths, external .as files and public/private classes. Things get a little more interactive with the addition of conditional, compound conditional and loop statements. Next, you go back to school and learn some math. Perkins makes this almost painless when he discusses basic math programming tasks such as generating random numbers. When he adds text and arrays, you are ready to create a word game which teaches you how to dynamically create and style text fields and load external text. At this point, Perkins starts to tie everything together while creating a more advanced game. He starts with a storyboard to plan the application's decision-making process and the flow of the game. He teaches how to write code that will detect and respond to correct and incorrect answers and determine when to reset or declare a winner. Todd Perkins is an Adobe Certified Instructor and the author of several books on Flash and web development including Adobe Flash CS3 Professional: Hands-On-Training and ActionScr