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What our customer's say!

"AS 3.0 Cook Book", It's me first AS 3.0 book.
This is a good book. Easy to read and learn action script 3.0.
Have examples good and clear for all of the topics.
I like it.

Este fue mi primer libro de Action Script 3.0.
Es un buen libro. Fácil de leer y aprrender AS 3.0
Tiene ejemplos buenos y fáciles para todos los puntos que toca.
Me gusta.

Carlos Barboni
[...]





"basic idea", very simple recipes. for any intermediate to advanced programmer this book is not recommended.

"Spend your money elsewhere!", In theory this book could have been very good. There were a few things that I did like about it. I liked the problem, solution, discussion approach to learning ActionScript. The book covered all of the topics I was interested in. It used real world examples to demonstrate the points.

The reasons I gave this book a poor rating were the fact that it was written for Flex developers and all examples used the Flex tool to build (not very good for me who uses Flash), and they continually gave examples and explained how to solve problems using their predefined, custom classes. The pages would have been better spent showing us how to build these useful Classes ourselves, instead of teaching us how to use them. Luckily for me, I was already versed in ActionScript and could easily understand that these Classes were not part of ActionScript. If I were not, I think it would have been rather confusing to try to pick out their custom classes from what comes with ActionScript 3. I'm trying to learn ActionScript, not the custom Classes the authors have created.

If you are new to ActionScript and not a Flex developer, do yourself a favor and buy a different book.

_t

"Exactly What the Title Says - No More No Less", This book is about ActionScript ONLY. when I bought it, I was hoping to find cookbook solutions for Flash and/or Flex IDE and all the step-by-step color illustrations and the cool visual effects that you can implement with those IDEs. That is not really what this book is geared for. So when I first started this review, I really wanted to give it a less-than-5-star rating, but I realized I can't do that in all fairness, because it does serve the purpose it portends. If you want an unadorned, pedantic, O'Reilly-ish how-to on ActionScript, this their ilk. If you want something with easy-to-follow illustrations on the Flash/Flex IDE and flashy visual effects, look elsewhere. Buyer beware.

"Falls short of the Cookbook quality, outdated", I've been a fan of programmer's cookbooks ever since the famous Perl Cookbook ages ago. It's a great way to get into a language and do away with any nagging thoughts that maybe you didn't solve a problem well.

This specific cookbook falls short, though. I tried to read it cover to cover as well as individual chapters, but I found it oddly balanced. For example, the authors waste three recipes on about 10 pages about generating a random number (which is just one command!), and then describe event handling (the big thing!) on half a page. I also find it strange to read about trigonometry in a programmer's book, and I don't think recipes work very well for explaining basic language features (such as how to create a new object, or how to "trace a message").

Mostly though, the book is outdated with the release of flex2/3. Yes, Actionscript 3 is still current, but you don't roll your own buttons as subclasses of sprite anymore!

In short, I give it three stars for content, and subtract 1 for being outdated. If you want to read about Actionscript 3, Adobe has a very nicely outlined pdf online, which is an easy read compared to these confusing and stale recipes.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Great book on Actionscript...", I've been learning Flex 2 and wanted to know a bit more about Actionscript and this book delivered! Plenty of good examples that have given me a MUCH better understanding of Actionscript. I never really learned much about Flash and so never wrote one line of Actionscript until I started to learn Flex (if you haven't heard about Flex yet go to Adobe.com and read up about it, it's pretty cool) and the books I had would show about 1/2 Actionscript and 1/2 mxml. So after getting a good understanding in mxml and basic Actionscript I wanted to learn more and this book was a big help. If you're even remotely interested in learning Actionscript this is the book to get!

"The end of a tunnel", I consider myself as an early adopter of anything in interactive communication. I founded my company Falcomedia in 1989 with only one goal: to produce interactive multimedia communication. By then only possible on Mac's with programs like Hypercard, Supercard (in color) or Macromind's Director (called Videoworks by then). I definately see AS3 as the end of a tunnel and the start of really great things to come. It's possible now, no workarounds, pure OOP and this book is basic.

Read als Keith Peter's Actionsript 3.0 Animation and let your visions flow. I can't see anything stopping us from bringing good UI, quality design, functionalty, efficient production and scalability to the next generation of the web.

Peter Bohny, Falcomedia Systems AG, Switzerland

"The Missing Method();", This book has what appears to be many great animation solutions; however, there is a very important piece missing. The code that connects the packages in the book to your time line in Flash CS3 Actionscript 3.0.

"Tasty Recipes for Everyday Actionscript Use", There is so much information packed into this book, it's hard to sum it all up. Basically, if you have an actionscript question from TextFields to XML or loading video to gradient fills it will be answered in this book.

Probably the best part about this cookbook is how well organized it is. You'll have no trouble finding the term you're looking for in the table of contents or in the index if it's something a little more specific. The answers fully answer the question without going on too many tangents. Sometimes it feels like they overexplain some of the examples because the example actionscript code can usually speak for itself.

I have a love/hate relationship with some of their answers because they choose to create a set of custom classes to solve some of the common problems. I appreciate how much time it saves to download their classes and then use their customs methods, but it almost feels like it's cheating to teach that you're supposed to use one of their custom classes to code correctly.

There seems to be some inconsistencies in the quality of the explanations as well. I imagine it's because there are three different authors contributing to the book. Some of the examples are brilliant, while others seem barely adequate. For example, the sound chapter has excellent examples of adjusting volume, pan, and pulling sounds out of the sound spectrum (which is a very exciting addition to Actionscript 3!) which wraps up with a three page spread of code showing a full mp3 application with everything you might want to do with it. On the other hand, there's the File Management chapter which seems choppy and mashed together and lacks a full package example showing a how all the code fits together.

Whatever way you look at it, there is a lot of value to this book. I know there's code in the book that I will only use once or twice, but I'm glad to know that it's there when the time comes to look it up. Although much of this information is available online, you will definitely save yourself hours of time by having this book handy on the shelf to pull out and quickly find the recipe you're looking for. Although not perfect, I still feel like this book deserves 5 stars because it stands out above the rest of the Actionscript books out there.


"Standard O'Reilly goodness", This book is a great actionscript reference in the typical O'Reilly reference format.