December 2002
Intermediate to advanced
1088 pages
192h 4m
English
Content preview from ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide, Second Edition
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This is the Title of the Book, eMatter Edition
Copyright © 2007 O’Reilly & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.
3
Chapter 1
CHAPTER 1
A Gentle Introduction
for Nonprogrammers
I’m going to teach you to talk to Flash.
Not just to program in Flash, but to say things to it and listen to what it has to say in
return. This is not a metaphor or simply a rhetorical device. It’s a philosophical
approach to programming.
Programming languages are used to send information to and receive information
from computers. They are collections of vocabulary and grammar used to communi-
cate, just like human languages. Using a programming language, we tell a computer
what to do or ask it for information. It listens, tries to perform the requested actions,
and gives responses. So, while you may think you are reading this book in order to
“learn to program,” you are actually learning to communicate with Flash. But, of
course, Flash doesn’t speak English, French, German, or Cantonese. Flash’s native
language is ActionScript, and you’re going to learn to speak it.
Learning to speak a computer language is sometimes considered synonymous with
learning to program. But there is more to programming than learning a language’s
syntax. What would it be like if Flash could speak English—if we didn’t need to
learn ActionScript in order to communicate with it?
What would happen if we were to say, “Flash, make a ball bounce around the ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.