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ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers | 
 enlarge | Authors: Joey Lott, Darron Schall, Keith Peters
Publisher: Adobe Dev Library
Category: Book
List Price: £28.50
Buy New: £15.11
You Save: £13.39 (47%)
Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 27984
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 586
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.9
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.2
ISBN: 0596526954
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.696
EAN: 9780596526955
ASIN: 0596526954
Publication Date: October 11, 2006
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews:
 Great Intro to Actionscript 3.0 August 20, 2008
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
For a programmer with some knowledge of programming in any language, ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook provides a great introduction to Actionscript.
The teaching method used is a hands one with the emphasis on doing examples rather than abstract theory. The examples cover a thorough and broad range of programming project requirements likely to be faced by any ActionScript 3 programmer e.g xml, web services, socket programming, sending and loading data,to name a few.
The first 2 chapters, 'Actionscript Basics' and 'Custom Classes' provide an excellent introduction to Actionscript 3. Basic programming tasks such as looping statements, timers,etc are covered with detailed examples.
ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook also introduces the preferred IDE for testing and working with Actionscript, 'Flex'. This is a major advantage to a beginner in AS 3.0 and Flex. A simple trace example introduces you to the entirely code based Flex IDE with its runtime environment and Flex debugger quicker than any theoretical description of Flex and 'trace'.
Advantages of using Flex should be immediately apparent.
By the end of chapter 2, 'Custom Classes', the reader should have a good enough foundation in Actionscript to duck and dive into the following chapters to test their well explained examples according to their interests and code requirements. Of particular interest to me were chapters and examples on 'Storing Persistent Data', 'Local Shared Objects', cross scripting, and communicating with other movies. Many examples show alternative approaches to the same project.
Though 'ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook' was first published in 2006 and refers to the Flex 2.0 IDE, Flex is currently at Flex 3.1, any reader interested in Actionscript 3.0 and Flex cannot but gain by acquiring their copy. Joey Lott, Darren Schall and Keith Peters, authors, are to be congratulated for their excellent work in providing us with an invaluable reference tool for Actionscipt projects.
Colm Brazel
20 August 2008
 This is not a ccokbook May 25, 2008
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book isn't what it seemed (at least what it seems to me).
It is an introduction to programming with ActionScript in Flex Builder 3. It may still be useful for those working in the free SDK and in Flash, but that isn't its focus and it doesn't discuss those tools. It also assumes you're working in pure ActionScript, so Flex authors (surely the biggest contingent using Flex Builder) will have to adapt as well.
But the things that annoyed me was the lack of real recipes here. To me cookbook should take a competent programmer and show best practice in common, but non-trivial areas.
Firstly, most of the recipes in the book are trivial. Things like "you need to iterate over the items in an array" - solution "use a for loop". or "you need to carry out an action conditionally" - "use an if statement". Most of the recipes just point to one or two API functions. That may be ok if you're completely new to actionscript - but in that case you'd want a proper guide that walked you throug the tech - the question and answer format isn't helpful if you're going through in sequence.
And secondly, the work isn't that well edited, and the solutions to some of the few more sophisticated problems are not optimal for performance.
I wouldn't recommend this book. It seems to not know who its audience is, and fall between the cracks.
Things you find out once you have bought this book July 16, 2007
11 out of 12 found this review helpful
From page 1: 'This book assumes that you have obtained a copy of Flex Builder 2 and have succesfully installed it on your computer.' Then it continues by using (just) Flex Builder.
This is an unpleasant surprise for the vast majority of ActionScript users used to Flash, not Flex Builder. Adobe sells Flex Builder 2 at $499. Flex Builder is a combination of the Flex SDK and Eclipse, both Open Source and free to download. This raises the question as to why Flex is so expensive. You'll never find out from reading this book. Maybe we'll have to buy another book from Lott, 'Programming Flex 2', first?
Apart from this, there are too many 'dumb' typo's in this book - in contrast to the just two you'll find in the online errata - something you wouldn't expect from long-time serious publisher O'Reilly and an Adobe Developer Library book. Specially in computer code, every character counts, every developer is painfully aware.
Nice introduction and reference February 7, 2007
4 out of 12 found this review helpful
This is a nice introduction which will help you to improve your understaning of ActionScript 3.0
You don't need to read from beginning to end. Just browse through the topics and read the chapter that you are interested in.
It is explains how ActionScript 3.0 is different from 2.0 and examples are simple which makes reading through easy.
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