Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 [Paperback]

ActionScript is the native scripting language of Flash. ActionScript knowledge is essential within the world of Flash design and development, as Flash remains a leading tool for cutting-edge interactive design and development.

ActionScript is what gives Flash its power, but with that power comes a certain level of complexity, which can be intimidating. This beginners’ book, significantly updated since the last edition, covers all of the basics of ActionScript using version 8 of Flash. The skills acquired by working through this book will enable you to move on to more advanced friends of ED books, such as Foundation PHP 5 for Flash, Foundation ActionScript Animation or Foundation XML for Flash.

This book contains all you need to understand and make use of ActionScript, and to have some fun while learning. The Foundation series teaching style is ideal if you're a non-programmer who wants to learn Flash programming quickly and thoroughly. The authors teach the basics, and provide an all-around proficiency in ActionScript, as well as Flash components within Flash 8. You’ll gain the practical skills to build ActionScript based Flash projects, including making initial design decisions, structuring code, and testing. An ongoing case study means that by the end of the book, you’ll have constructed a cutting-edge Flash site to showcase your newly learned skills.

David Powers writes: This is a well-loved, user-friendly guide to learning ActionScript to add extra pizzazz and functionality to your Flash movies. Kristian Besley and I have thoroughly revised Sham Bhangal's original text, bringing it bang up to date, and using all the latest best practices for working with ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8. We've removed older techniques, such as prototypes, to make the eventual transition to ActionScript 3.0 in future versions of Flash much smoother. This edition also features a new chapter on working with XML, as well as a much expanded section on widely-used version 2 components, such as radio buttons, check boxes, and the combo box.

Kristian Besley has worked with multimedia for three years, but has been creative with computers for much longer. He currently develops Flash-based material within an educational environment. This material includes interactive presentations to illustrate how scientific things work, as well as graphical user interfaces and tools allowing web-based content creation with basic computer skills. He was a contributing author on the seminal Flash Math Creativity, and many other friends of ED books. In 2002, he launched the world's first bi-annual HTML markup-based TableArt competition. The competition was an unbelievable success.