So you’re ready to take Flash to the next level and start diving into Actionscripting then this book is for you! Colin Moock is one of the masters of Actionscript and his book Essential Actionscript 2.0 by O’Reilly publishing is one worth having.
Not only is Colin Moock a master of Actionscript , he also has a heart of a teacher and it show throughout this book. The way he teaches Actionscript makes the concepts very easy to grasp as he relates the various concepts to real world situations.
Moock starts out with defining the Actionscript language covering things such as feature sets, components and how Object-Oriented programming can be applied within the Flash environment. He then moves into Application development where he teaches you the basic structures of an Object-Oriented programming application framework starting with setting up working directories. Under the same topic, he then moves on to cover the document timeline, classes, more components, movieclips and closes the chapter dealing with libraries. Finally, Moock wraps up this book by discussing a variety of approaches to programming situations called design patterns. Design patterns are various ways to analyze a flash project and develop a solution for some aspects of the programming.
Moock is also careful to point out that “a design pattern does not describe the entire structure of an application, nor does it describe a specific algorithm in an application” Moock says these design patterns describe how an object relates to a class in a generalized situation.
To me this section on design patterns was a little tough to follow, I am a designer slowly turning programmer and I found these ideas very new and difficult to get my head around. All in all, I thought this book was an excellent primer for getting into Flash Actionscripting and I would strongly recommend this book or any others by Colin Moock to anyone who is serious about learning Actionscript for Flash.
David
Pittsburgh Adobe User Group Manager
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