Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! | Keith Peters

Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! | Keith Peters | A great buy, not a great upgrade

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Foundation Actions...

	Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! Keith Peters friends of ED, 2007 - 568 pages average customer review:based on 30 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

What Can't Actionscript Do?

For animation and programming outside the Adobe Flash interface, this is one of the best books I have read. It starts out with an introduction to concepts that apply across the board for animation and then continues on in to physics based animation and eventually 3D programming. While the book uses ActionScript as the primary language, the concepts it employs easily translate into other graphical programming languages.

Something to keep in mind when you order this book is that it will not teach you how to use Adobe Flash. While "Making Things Move" is very applicable to this program, it is geared more towards Flex Builder 2 and the Flex/AS 3 command-line compiler and Flex 2 SDK (the last two of which are free from Adobe's website at the time of writing this review).

If you are looking for a book that will help you get started with Flash-based game development, this is a great book to use. I would consider it an excellent resource for both novice and advanced users.

If you are looking for a book on developing sites that interact with databases or send and retrieve online data, this is not the book for you. Instead I would suggest The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0.

Another resource I would reccomend for any Flash developer is ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers, which is good for just about anything else "Making Things Move!" and "The Essential Guide" don't cover.

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A great buy, not a great upgrade

First off, the previous version was the best actionscript and or graphics book for the Flash environment I had ever read. Useful segments of script and the practical approach to getting common graphics, animation, collision, 3D and kinematics work done were invaluable.

My criticism of the current edition is that, with the exception of placing everything in a class structure for actionscript 3.0, the new edition lacks novel content. There are no new techniques, projects, nor animations. Also, the programs may be written in classes, but often the programs don't take advantage of the object oriented techniques encouraged in 3.0 actionscript.

The parts about using the Flex SDK are interesting as they allow people to program in actionscript without having to buy anything. It is pretty obvious that this book was written before the Flash CS3 version came out as it would be more aptly named "actionscript animation 3.0 for flex" as some of the techniques necessary to make graphical objects in the flex environment are inconvenient for those using Flash CS3.

So, my bottom line:
If you don't have this book and want to program graphics in flash/flex, get this book before all others.
If you already have the previous edition, don't bother upgrading. (though for me it didn't work out too bad because I used the previous edition so much I wore it out.)

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Must have

This book is a must have for any serious flash artist (no designer/developer tags...). It approaches AS3 as it was meant to be, an objet oriented laguage, not only for .fla projects. The author is in the top of this line and the reason why I gave 4 instead of 5 is that the author does not go as deep as I would have liked in some cases, but still, if I lose the book, I would buy it again.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6

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