Book Review: Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock
The world of interactive development has grown immensely in the past few years, due to the increases in processing power, the emergence of social networking, the proliferation of web video, and the very real demands of web users for more, well, interactive experiences – whether they be on a desktop or mobile device, online or off-line. With all of this demand and the rise of available creative tools on the market, we can say that, now more than ever, it’s a wonderful time to be a Flash developer.
Along with the proliferation of so many Flash applications and the ubiquity of the Flash player across platforms, however, knowledge of ActionScript becomes increasingly important. The would-be interactive guru simply must possess a strong grasp of web and application flow concepts, and a real ability to put these ideas into action using code.
To provide this very knowledge, author Colin Moock has given us his book, Essential ActionScript 3.0. With over 800 pages of useful information about the nuances of the AS3 language, this book certainly gives the reader a solid foundation of the latest version of Adobe’s scripting language for Flash and Flex.
Although this volume is aimed at all levels of Flash developers and designers, beginners will find that a substantial investment in time will be necessary for absorption of the material covered. The efforts of a novice ActionScripter will certainly be rewarded however, once the methods given are put into practice. Unlike ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8, it’s just not possible to ‘wing it’ when writing scripts. Clients and users require interfaces which are designed and executed from the ground up to be usable, intuitive, and responsive. There are a lot of nuances which must be understood when working with the Flash player such as mouse input, keyboard input and focus, and the display list. We also need to understand the power of the garbage collection process (which Colin covers in detail) so that elements can be removed from memory (keeping our playback and loading of objects smooth).
So in the sense of covering the basics and more, this book is indispensable. Following are a list of highlights:
Chapter 1: Core Concepts
This chapter will be of most use to those new to scripting in general. The author discusses variables, literals, syntax, and compilation, as well as core object-oriented programming (OOP) principles. This is a light read for a lot of experienced developers, but if you are new to the Flash player (coming over from Java) it is very useful.
Chapter 5: Functions
Since every ‘web’ or ‘interactive’ scripting language has its own peculiar implementation of functions and methods, this is a very important chapter to read thoroughly. You can also learn about nested functions here, which are a wonderful feature of AS3 (I love them). He also covers ‘functions as values’, as we often find ourselves passing around functions between classes and .swf files in ActionScript 3.0
Chapter 6: Inheritance
This chapter is an absolute must-read even if you are somewhat experienced with OOP, as display list programming is all about inheritance and you will find yourself extending the Movie Clip and Sprite classes, as well as others like Bitmap.
Chapter 12: Events and Event Handling
Interactive content is all about events, and you will spend loads of time writing event handlers. This chapter will save you time and show you the AS3 improvements (which are many) over the AS2 model.
Chapter 20: The Display API and the Display List
The Display List is all new in AS3, so to take advantage of this functionality, you need to get to know it. Movie Clips are just part of a bigger picture now, so if you’re coming from AS2 you have to get at least this far in the book to make things really happen.
Conclusion
Designers and developers moving to AS3 and Flash CS3 or Flex from previous versions of ActionScript will find this book to be an invaluable resource and a great investment. You will find it pretty easy to make the transition to AS3 – if you take the time to study and work with the examples that is. The only criticism I have for this book is that it is not quite as easy for beginners to ‘jump start’ their way into AS3. If you are a complete ActionScript novice, this book might be slightly over your head at first, so you will find it to be a bit of a learning curve to get up to speed. (True beginners might want to look at Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser.) All in all, I highly recommend Essential ActionScript 3.0 as a complete primer, how-to, and reference on the language. Happy scripting!
Related Articles