Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8

Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8

An excellent book that I would like to suggest to anyone who is keen on learning  Action Scripting from the scratch. This gives you a real good introduction and builds a strong foundation. It mentions a few useful game programming tricks and techniques as well. This book illustrates a step-by-step website development project, running through the various chapters progressively implementing the skills that you have learned. For those like me, who don’t intend to know how to make a Flash website, can safely skip this portion and save a considerable amount of time.

However please note that this book title is an older edition on Flash 8 and AS2. You might like to read the newer edition – Foundation-Actionscript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex-FriendsofED. For me the older one works better as I want to explore Flash Lite for mobile devices, which is currently limited to AS2 only. Many developers experienced observed that AS2 is sufficient for making most of the Flash games that are presently online. I feel it should be the scope of the project that should decide the tool you need to develop (AS2 or AS3), but not the other way around.

I skipped the first 2 chapters and read chapter 3-6 (Intro to Flash, Movieclips) over a weekend. I was happy to read something that demystified the concept of Timelines and Movieclips to me. I continued to read chapter 7-8 (Objects and Classes) in next 2-3 days.

Now I had a tough choice before me – should I start coding or finish the rest of the book? I was tempted to code and see something happening before my eyes, but at the same time I wanted to complete it in a single run as coming back to it would be difficult later. Then I had an idea to deal with the uncertainty. I wrote a simple script to roll a dice and let it decide what should I do next? I started with a text-based output and slowly evolved it into a graphic animated dice.  I worked and polished it over two weekends before getting back to the book again. I read the next two chapters (reusable code and game sprites) and then decided to not to go any further without starting to implement the knowledge I had gained so far.

Finally, this book is an amazing one to start learning with. I rate it as a MUST-HAVE for everyone into learning AS.