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, you’ll 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 doesn’t 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, you’ll be creating killer Flash applications before you know it. In this book, you’ll: 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: #212480 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 450 pages

About the Author
Steve Webster works as a developer at Yahoo! in London, where he spends his time preaching the virtues of good Flash and Flex to his colleagues. Over the yars, he has written and contributed to a vast number of Flash-related books for Friends of ED and maintains a blog at dynamicflash.com and runs the companion site for this book at foundationas3.com.

Sean McSharry has been a Flash Developer and Designer since 1999 (Flash 3).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.

After studying theatre in London, then working for several years as an actor in the US, Todd Yard was introduced to Flash in 2000 and was quickly taken by how it allowed for both stunning creativity and programmatic logic application--a truly left-brain, right brain approach to production--and has not looked back. He now freelances as a Flash developer in New York City, creating both silly animations and utilitarian applications.

Customer Reviews

Excellent book!
I've been using Flash 8/Actionscript 2.0 for a while and decided it was time to take a more object oriented approach to my Flash projects.

Little did I know that Actionscript 3 had some large fundamental changes (namely the "display list" and the loss of all the familiar _root, _parent commands etc.).

This book does an excellent job to get you back up to speed in Actionscript and even gives you a decent dose of OOP basics (since everything is a class in AS3). The book is full of highly relevant examples which you can use as reference in the future, or even base your own projects on.

Highly recommended!

Quality
I bought this book and also Rick Shupe's begginers guide to actionscript, looking back it was a bit daft to buy both but it has enabled me to compare them.

This book is a LOT better, from the very beginning everything is explained really well, he never leaves anything out. You are never wondering 'yeah, I get that but what does that package thing mean'.

He either tells you, it's coming up or gives and explanation on the spot.

As for AS3 it's much harder than AS2, much much harder...only done the first couple of chapters and will start the rick Shupe's apparent 'beginners guide once I've learnt the basics with this book.

Wow! Cracking book!
I got really excited when i started learning AS3 and like most... i brought colin moocks book ( Essential Actionscript) and a few others to get started on. Even though Colin Moock is the man and his book is a well written book, it's a very technical book and i got a bit bored to be honest. This book though is definitely the best and most fun book i have read.
I couldn't put it down. It throws you in the deep end to begin with though but you get to see some nice little animations and it certainly gets your attention and makes you realize how much fun the book will be.

Buy this and then buy Keith Peters book called "Foundations Actionscript- making things move".