Macromedia Flash MX ActionScript Bible (Paperback)

The book is aimed squarely at developers or advanced Flash designers that want to know more about programming; it does not explain how to do animations.

It includes an explanation of object oriented programming principles and includes some excellent examples that really helped me get to grips with the language and programming model.

All built-in classes are discussed and you are given tutorials on how to create your own ActionScript classes and Flash components. The accompanying CD includes the Flash files to which you add code by following the exercises without creating the graphics and animations from scratch; something that really helped me get up to speed and now I feel confident that I can write advanced ActionScript code to take full advantage of the Flash player, although my graphic design ability has a long way to go!

To summarise: a book for developers and advanced Flash users that want too become accomplished Flash programmers. If you need a book that tells you how to create animations and walks you through the Flash interface then you’ll need to look elsewhere.

The book is assembled in the style of web site, pages cross-referenced with other pages. This may seem helpful, but once you go to a page (typically further into the book rather than back) you are met with heavy subject matter that requires further reading in itself.

Too few of the examples are what I would call ‘real world’ and this only compounds the many other problems with this book. It would be nice to see two or three examples covered in detail, then have a final topic covering how the three would then work together as a whole, which is how people work; solve the problems individually and then approach the main task with a better understanding of the whole. Each topic is covered in almost complete isolation.

Having stated that binary operations are far and few between and would be called upon only rarely is a little too much. The book is littered with these bizarre and arcane-looking lines of code that further bewilder me.

Trigonometry. I think that says it all, really. Einstein I’m not.

I think the worst problem of all is the many typo errors in the book. This is intensely annoying, made even worse when you’re sat there for an hour checking over your code, wondering why your script won’t work. Then you decide to cheat and go to the cd for the actual final finished tutorial file only to find that there is extra code in the file isn’t present in the book.

I expect typos, but I also expect an errata section on the publishers web site. It took me nearly ten minutes to find the book on the publishers site only to find scant information about the book other than a brief synopsis and a price. Not good.

I had high hopes of getting into ActionScript, but I feel as though I’m not all that further forward after reading through the first third. Many areas of ActionScript are not clear in my mind and re-reading the required sections simply doesn’t help at all.

As a reference, the book will prove useful, but to claim to be a 100% comprehensive book gets 2 out of 5 in my book. Conclusion: could try harder.

I had already had a previous understanding of Flash MX actionscript, so found it OK as a reference, but looking back, I think I would have gone for a more reference specific book.
For a beginner, I would say it is OK, but as said before, the examples are not too great.

However, not everything about the book is poor. I found the sections on sound and xml very useful. XML was relatively new to me, and after reading the section I was striving to use XML in my applications. There are sections of the book that are rather well written, such as the string or xml Object sections, but others are quite poor in the way that they are too shallow.

Overall I think it is a great general based Flash MX actionscript book, but there are better reference books out there, likewise with beginner books.