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Product Description
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Well before Ajax and Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation hit the scene, Macromedia offered the first method for building web pages with the responsiveness and functionality of desktop programs with its Flash-based "Rich Internet Applications". Now, new owner Adobe is taking Flash and its powerful capabilities beyond the Web and making it a full-fledged development environment.
Rather than focus on theory, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook concentrates on the practical application of ActionScript, with more than 300 solutions you can use to solve a wide range of common coding dilemmas. You'll find recipes that show you how to:
- Detect the user's Flash Player version or their operating system
- Build custom classes
- Format dates and currency types
- Work with strings
- Build user interface components
- Work with audio and video
- Make remote procedure calls using Flash Remoting and web services
- Load, send, and search XML data
- And much, much more ...
Each code recipe presents the Problem, Solution, and Discussion of how you can use it in other ways or personalize it for your own needs, and why it works. You can quickly locate the recipe that most closely matches your situation and get the solution without reading the whole book to understand the underlying code. Solutions progress from short recipes for small problems to more complex scripts for thornier riddles, and the discussions offer a deeper analysis for resolving similar issues in the future, along with possible design choices and ramifications. You'll even learn how to link modular ActionScript pieces together to create rock-solid solutions for Flex 2 and Flash applications.
When you're not sure how ActionScript 3.0 works or how to approach a specific programming dilemma, you can simply pick up the book, flip to the relevant recipe(s), and quickly find the solution you're looking for.
Adobe Developer Library is a co-publishing partnership between O'Reilly Media and Adobe Systems, Inc. and is designed to produce the number one information resources for developers who use Adobe technologies. Created in 2006, the Adobe Developer Library is the official source for comprehensive learning solutions to help developers create expressive and interactive web applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform. With top-notch books and innovative online resources covering the latest in rich Internet application development, the Adobe Developer Library offers expert training and in-depth resources, straight from the source.
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Customer Reviews
This is an unpleasant surprise for the vast majority of ActionScript users used to Flash, not Flex Builder. Adobe sells Flex Builder 2 at $499. Flex Builder is a combination of the Flex SDK and Eclipse, both Open Source and free to download. This raises the question as to why Flex is so expensive. You'll never find out from reading this book. Maybe we'll have to buy another book from Lott, 'Programming Flex 2', first?
Apart from this, there are too many 'dumb' typo's in this book - in contrast to the just two you'll find in the online errata - something you wouldn't expect from long-time serious publisher O'Reilly and an Adobe Developer Library book. Specially in computer code, every character counts, every developer is painfully aware.
The teaching method used is a hands one with the emphasis on doing examples rather than abstract theory. The examples cover a thorough and broad range of programming project requirements likely to be faced by any ActionScript 3 programmer e.g xml, web services, socket programming, sending and loading data,to name a few.
The first 2 chapters, 'Actionscript Basics' and 'Custom Classes' provide an excellent introduction to Actionscript 3. Basic programming tasks such as looping statements, timers,etc are covered with detailed examples.
ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook also introduces the preferred IDE for testing and working with Actionscript, 'Flex'. This is a major advantage to a beginner in AS 3.0 and Flex. A simple trace example introduces you to the entirely code based Flex IDE with its runtime environment and Flex debugger quicker than any theoretical description of Flex and 'trace'.
Advantages of using Flex should be immediately apparent.
By the end of chapter 2, 'Custom Classes', the reader should have a good enough foundation in Actionscript to duck and dive into the following chapters to test their well explained examples according to their interests and code requirements. Of particular interest to me were chapters and examples on 'Storing Persistent Data', 'Local Shared Objects', cross scripting, and communicating with other movies. Many examples show alternative approaches to the same project.
Though 'ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook' was first published in 2006 and refers to the Flex 2.0 IDE, Flex is currently at Flex 3.1, any reader interested in Actionscript 3.0 and Flex cannot but gain by acquiring their copy. Joey Lott, Darren Schall and Keith Peters, authors, are to be congratulated for their excellent work in providing us with an invaluable reference tool for Actionscipt projects.
Colm Brazel
20 August 2008
It is an introduction to programming with ActionScript in Flex Builder 3. It may still be useful for those working in the free SDK and in Flash, but that isn't its focus and it doesn't discuss those tools. It also assumes you're working in pure ActionScript, so Flex authors (surely the biggest contingent using Flex Builder) will have to adapt as well.
But the things that annoyed me was the lack of real recipes here. To me cookbook should take a competent programmer and show best practice in common, but non-trivial areas.
Firstly, most of the recipes in the book are trivial. Things like "you need to iterate over the items in an array" - solution "use a for loop". or "you need to carry out an action conditionally" - "use an if statement". Most of the recipes just point to one or two API functions. That may be ok if you're completely new to actionscript - but in that case you'd want a proper guide that walked you throug the tech - the question and answer format isn't helpful if you're going through in sequence.
And secondly, the work isn't that well edited, and the solutions to some of the few more sophisticated problems are not optimal for performance.
I wouldn't recommend this book. It seems to not know who its audience is, and fall between the cracks.
This book explain the basics of actionscript 3 at the beginning and goes further to more... Read more
You don't need to read from beginning to end. Read more
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