ActionScript 3.0 Programming: Overview, Getting Started, and Examples of New Concepts

Object-Oriented Programming

One of my favorite books on object-oriented programming (OOP) books is Alexander Nakhimovsky's and Tom Myers' JavaScript Objects: Object Use and Data Manipulation with JavaScript (Wrox, 1998). I like it because the authors are smart, and they're not trying to prove how smart they are because they know OOP. What's more, they show how OOP can be applied to JavaScript, a weakly typed, interpreted language. Coming from a couple of Colgate University computer science professors accustomed to programming in languages like C++ and Java, this perspective and stance caught my attention more than the same such issued by someone who just happens to like JavaScript. The clear implication is that you don't need an OOP language to apply OOP principles. In fact, OOP is as much an approach to programming as it is the built-in structures of a language.

Another point made by Nakhimovsky and Myers was that in the future (post-1998), more non-programmers would be writing programs. In other words, more people without a computer science or computer engineering degree would be hacking code—literally. The prediction back in 1998 accurately portrays most ActionScript programmers; starting with just a few statements, operators, and commands, ActionScript has grown to a full-fledged OOP language in ActionScript 3.0. Still, though, most who write ActionScript programs aren't programmers with CS degrees. Nakhimovsky and Myers were not lamenting the fact that non-programmers would ...