Learning ActionScript 3.0 Book Review

The book is generally quite good, and split up into sensible sections.

It takes you through the basics of ActionScript before introducing and explaining object orientated programming in more detail.

There are lots of examples that are generally quite clear to follow and work straight off.

The big stumbling block with the book is that the index at the back is very poor and it is impossible to find what is and isn't in the book that way.

Therefore a quick reference guide it is not - you cannot just look something up, you need to really be familiar with all the content in the book to find out if it covers something or not.

The biggest shortcoming of the book is that nowhere does it tell you about how to pass in variables from outside the script. This is very surprising as so many Flash applications these days are web based games and similar where taking the username in and passing a score out, for instance, are essential - and generally any web based Flash application will want to be able to take in variables or pass them back out so this omission is inexplicable, otherwise the book would have scored much higher.

So, generally a useful introduction and you won't be disappointed by the book, but you will be frustrated by the indexing and the surprising omission above.

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reviewer: dan moore