Book Reviews

Colin Moock starts you off easy with a gentle introduction of programming, but it quickly becomes a very steep learning curve after chapter one. The non-technically literate may want to try another book first. That said, it's brilliant and a must-have for anyone that's serious about learning ActionScripting.

This book is highly technical, and after learning to code with it, I suggest you give Flash Math Creativity a look to see what cool tricks you can do with your newly aquired AS skills.

There are zero glossy full color double page pictures showing cool Flash effects, or one-shot Flash recipe projects which present a lone, sad fragment of Actionscript as an incidental gimmick. All you get is a beginning-to-end systematic and methodical development of the Actionscript "programming language". After reading through part of this book, it amazes me how much depth there is in Actionscript and how weird it is that Macromedia buried what appears to be a full-featured object-oriented language behind all those graphical palettes. What is cool is the way Moock has you use Flash, you'd think you were using Visual Studio -- instead of a graphical application accessing some script functions, you use Flash like a programming application that has a really well developed graphical module.

Moock + O'Reilly also do a really good job of mapping out the language a la traditional C++ type texts in a way that should let most programmers build what they need to build to control Flash objects and do mathematical processing of general stuff.

The best feature of the book is Moock's narrative style. His presentation is easy-going and conversational but also very concise. He describes relatively complex features straightforwardly, and never condescends like certain obnoxious Friends of Ed Foundation books. Few passages are cryptic. Code samples are relevant and not overly specific. The flow of one chapter into the next is logical, well-outlined, and easy to follow. He even reveals the presence of the interpreter in the first chapter and describes its function in controlling Flash with Actionscript, as with any other OO language. The appendices are beautiful in their depth and utility.

As a side note, I also think this would make a decent book to learn OOP, because that's actually what I am using it for right now. I disagree with some of the reviewers here because though it may be easily read by newbie programmers and up, it would probably be a steep curve for those without some similar mathematical or operational logic exposure; however, I think absolute beginners with good effort and some references can get as much out of this book as any other good intro book on programming, especially with the more visually rewarding output when everything works.

This book sets a standard for excellence.