Actionscripting in Flash MX (Voices) (Paperback)

Over the last few months I started looking for a good book that would outline the main changes to ActionScript in Flash MX. I was also keen on getting into Object Oriented programming in Flash, so was looking for a book that would act as a good primer.

I spent ages looking at Flash books and found them all to be lacking. Most of them focused purely on the animation side of things and would only devote a few chapters to ActionScript. Books that claimed to show all the new Features of MX focused almost entirely on the new GUI and had very little information on the new programming features, which are the real interesting parts of MX upgrade.

The few ActionScript books that I did find, started off on such a basic level that I almost felt they were patronising me. I needed to find a book that covered all (or most) of the new features in a succinct but professional manner and this what I found in "ActionScripting in Flash MX"  by Phillip Kerman.

The book starts with an overall discussion of good coding practices - something I wish I'd read when I started ActionScripting. It then moved on to looking at the main elements of the language. Dealing with control structures, functions, arrays, built in objects etc. Now being a Flash programmer I thought I knew all this stuff, but to be honest I did learn a thing or two in these chapters. I was particularly interested in the authors continued references to how Flash deal's with memory and how certain practices could cut down on wasted RAM. Both interesting and extremely useful, as Flash does tent to suffer poor performance when you have too much going on in your movies.

As the book progressed it built on the knowledge of the preceding chapters. The author was never afraid to bring in new concepts that he would cover in more detail later in the book, and this practice set up a good deal of anticipation - not something you'd expect in a book on flash programming.

The book was written from the start to focus on Flash MX's new Object Oriented approach, so by the time the author started discussing custom objects, prototypes etc. there was no huge change in philosophy.

The last section of the book was packed with in-depth examples that build on the concepts form earlier sections and showed how they could be used in practical situations. The last section is definitely something you'd want to dip in and out of, but it's always interesting to so how another programmer would tackle a particular task.

I'd say this books would have across the board appeal to anybody interested in ActionScript. For people wanting to learn ActionScript from scratch, it explains all the main concepts in an intelligent yet concise fashion. For people migrating from Flash 5 to Flash MX coding it shows a raft of new concepts and introduces the new Object Oriented approach, and for seasoned Flash programmers it has enough nuggets of useful information to make you re-evaluate how you tackle a complex project.

On the whole an excellent book.

Throughout its 662 pages, the author does describe steps for short exercises involving the topics being dealt with and the last 18 chapters comprise a series of workshops.

However, the workshop sections make up less than half the book and the practical elements of the chapters beforehand are not easy to follow. This is due to their presentation in the same chunky paragraph style of the main material. In the end, the result is a lot of reading and not enough work.

In my opinion, learning any aspect of computing is about doing not reading and this applies to scripting languages as much as anything else.

What a contrast there is between this book and Phillip Kerman's earlier one for Flash 5, Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 5 in 24 Hours. In that one (still my favourite tutorial book of all time), each chapter had at least two practical exercises the reader could follow and they were all presented in an easy to follow style.

ActionScripting in Flash MX is a useful tool for reference purposes because it's a very comprehensive introduction, especially with regard to new syntax. But the next ActionScript book I purchase must actually allow me to do a lot more ActionScripting. Otherwise, I may as well retire early and get some technical author to do all my programming from now on.