Product Description

'No matter what your background, the pages that follow will provide you with some excellent knowledge, insight, and even a little bit of wisdom in the realm of Flash and ActionScript. Happy learning!' - Branden Hall, from the Foreword. Written by Flash insiders with extensive knowledge of the technology, this guide is designed specifically to help Flash designers and developers make the leap from ActionScript 2.0 to the new object-oriented ActionScript 3.0 quickly and painlessly.Formatted so you can find any topic easily, "ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide" explains: Object-oriented programming (OOP) concepts, such as packages and classes; ActionScript 3.0 features and player enhancements that improve performance; and, Workflow differences between ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0 including tools, code editing, component sets, and image and font rendering. Where did it go? This is a guide to help you find familiar features in ActionScript 3.0, such as global functions, operators, properties, and statements. How do I? It includes step-by-step solutions for performing tasks with ActionScript 3.0, including input, sound, video, display, events, text, and more. Also included are overviews of Flash and ActionScript features and workflows. ActionScript 3.0 is a huge upgrade to Flash's programming language - and this guide helps you upgrade your skills to match it.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #316432 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 491 pages

About the Author
David Stiller is resident author at Community MX (over 30 articles), co-author of Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers (friends of ED) and contributor to How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS3 (Focal Press), by Chris Georgenes. His writing has appeared in Web Developer's & Designer's Journal and Adobe.com's Developer Center, and he speaks frequently about ActionScript at conferences such as TODCon 2007. http://www.quip.net/blog/ http://www.quip.net/resume/ http://www.quip.net/portfolio.html


Rich Shupe is the co-author of Learning ActionScript 3.0 (O'Reilly) and has been teaching ActionScript programming to students of all levels since the language became available. He founded his own training and development company, FMA, in 1995 and is a faculty member of New York's School of Visual Arts' Computer Art Dept. He writes about ActionScript at http://www.LearningActionScript3.com.

Jen DeHaan is an instructional designer attached to the Flash IDE team at Adobe Systems, Inc. Aside from her ongoing work at Adobe, Jen runs several community sites and forums for fun, and maintains a blog at weblogs.macromedia.com/dehaan.


Darren Richardson is the Technical Director at R/GA in London. He started life as a software Programmer, working for a few of the larger blue chip companies within the city of London (UK). In 1999 he found Flash, or as he likes to think, Flash found him. In the same year he created an online Flash resource for others to learn from; that resource is still going strong today. Darren also writes articles on Flash development and coding for a number of web designer magazines and is a technical editor for O'Reilly Publishers on a few other titles. Darren has a passion for pushing technology to the extreme to either break it or create something truly amazing. Some of his work and insights into the new media world can be found on his blog at www.playfool.com & www.experiment.org.uk

Customer Reviews

This book could make you *finally* grasp OOP and Classes in AS3
Before I bought this book I had read the AS3 Cookbook (nice, but very much geared towards Flex) and Moock's Essential AS3 (huge, and sometimes it's like a brick to read as well; I don't design such complex projects), and this book fits my needs as of now very nicely. I pull it up on the commute, and I have got the "finally I understand this!" (OOP, Classes...) several times while reading this book. Recommended!
Those migrating from AS2 should perhaps start near the end of the book, as it clarifies (did for me anyway) some very important things about framscripting do's and don'ts in AS3. Why near the end?
The real disappointment, and actually I feel cheated about this, is in the title "for developers using Flash CS4". The release of this book coincided with Adobe's launch of Flash CS4, but as far as I can see this book contains NOTHING about the new ActionScript features introduced in CS4, like simple 3D and audio handling. This book is for CS3, but everything applies here for CS4 as well (of course). I was looking for the freshest stuff on how to deal with the new features, but this manuscript is not new, and has not been updated to reflect new features in CS4. This is why I pull at least one star.
There are also annoying typos which makes some examples throw errors.

Despite this: my general impression is that it's well written (english is not my first language) and enlightning.

Awesome handbook
It's not that there aren't typos, or even erroneous code snippets into that title; there are, albeit just a few.

But it's as simple as this: whether you are a newcomer to the Flash world, or an experienced ActionScript 2.0 developer - like me - that book is a life-saver during your trip into the world of ActionScript 3.0.

Yes, "Essential ActionScript 3.0" is great, and "ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook" is very useful and I use them both continuously; but "The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide" is indispensable and, if I had to choose only one title among those three, that would be the one. Deserves every penny spend buying it.