Chapter 1. Core Concepts
A program is a set of written instructions to be executed (i.e., carried out) by a computer or a software application. The written, human-readable text of a program is called source code, or just code. The person who creates a program is called a programmer, a coder, or a developer. Every program is written in a particular programming language, just as every book is written in a particular language (English, Russian, Japanese, etc.). Programming languages dictate the syntax and grammar that programmers must use to form the instructions in a given program. This book provides from-the-ground-up coverage of the syntax, grammar, and usage of one specific programming language, ActionScript 3.0. Get ready for a good time.
Tools for Writing ActionScript Code
ActionScript code is written in plain text, so an ActionScript program can be created with nothing more than a simple text editor, such as Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Macintosh. However, most ActionScript programmers write ActionScript code using one (or both) of two commercial tools produced by Adobe Systems Incorporated: Flex Builder and the Flash authoring tool.
Flex Builder is an integrated development environment, or IDE. An IDE is an application for writing and managing code, much as a word processor is an application for creating printed documents. Developers use Flex Builder to create software applications and multimedia content using either ActionScript or MXML, or both. MXML is an XML-based language ...