Mini-review And Competition Of Essential ActionScript 3.0

The enhancements to ActionScript's performance, feature set, ease of use, cleanliness, and sophistication are simply staggering. Revolutionary improvements abound. Approximately half of the book focuses on the new features and functionality of ActionScript 3.0, while the rest focuses on changes between the 2 and 3 releases. Essential ActionScript has become the #1 resource for the Flash and ActionScript development community, and the reason is the author, Colin Moock. Many people even refer to it simply as "The Colin Moock book."

And for good reason: No one is better at turning ActionScript inside out, learning its nuances and capabilities, and then explaining everything in such an accessible way. Colin Moock is not just a talented programmer and technologist; he's also a gifted teacher.

 Part I. ACTIONSCRIPT FROM THE GROUND UP

• 1. Core Concepts
• 2. Conditionals and Loops
• 3. Instance Methods Revisited
• 4. Static Variables and Static Methods
• 5. Functions
  
• 6. Inheritance
  
• 7. Compiling and Running a Program
• 8. Datatypes and Type Checking
• 9. Interfaces
• 10. Statements and Operators
  
• 11. Arrays
  
• 12. Events and Event Handling
  
• 13. Exceptions and Error Handling
• 14. Garbage Collection
• 15. Dynamic ActionScript
• 16. Scope
• 17. Namespaces
• 18. XML and E4X
• 19. Flash Player Security Restrictions
  

Part II. DISPLAY AND INTERACTIVITY

• 20. The Display API and the Display List
• 21. Events and Display Hierarchies
• 22. Interactivity
• 23. Screen Updates
• 24. Programmatic Animation
• 25. Drawing with Vectors
• 26. Bitmap Programming
• 27. Text Display and Input
• 28. Loading External Display Assets
  

Part III. APPLIED ACTIONSCRIPT TOPICS

• 29. ActionScript and the Flash Authoring Tool
• 30. A Minimal MXML Application
• 31. Distributing a Class Library
  

Who is this book for?

Essential ActionScript 3.0 is aimed at both absolute beginners and ActionScript experts. It will guide beginners through the very basics of ActionScript gently guiding them towards ActionScript proficiency. For those who are experienced with ActionScript, this book will help them fill gaps in their knowledge and rethink important concepts in formal terms.

Conclusion

This book covers the fundamentals of ActionScript programming in detail. The book uses clear language and uses a project based approach. Besides a few minor pickups like the fact that you need to browse between chapters sometimes to find the information you are looking for the book is very good. The first two parts of the book are the most interesting parts of the book as they contain the bulk of information to give you a good understanding of ActionScript 3. We can highly recommend this book due to its extensive collection of projects, resources and interesting tutorials.