December 2007
Beginner
382 pages
13h 12m
English
Content preview from Learning ActionScript 3.0Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 2. CORE LANGUAGE FUNDAMENTALS
It’s true that ActionScript 3.0 is a complete rewrite of Flash’s internal scripting language, and it’s also true that ActionScript 3.0 doesn’t share the same runtime code base as prior versions of ActionScript. But that’s all behind the scenes. The truth is, all versions of ActionScript to date share quite a bit in common.
This is not hard to understand, since ActionScript was based on a scripting language standard (called ECMA-262) that grew from the success of JavaScript, and that ongoing versions of ActionScript are backward compatible to support legacy projects.
That is not to say that the language isn’t growing. Certainly, each new version of ActionScript introduces a batch of newly supported features, as is true with the evolution of most programming languages. And, since the decision was made to write ActionScript 3.0 from the ground up, the opportunity presented itself to tidy up a few messy things that lingered from previous versions—namely, tightening up and requiring best practices that had been optional, and restructuring the event and display systems.
All of this progress, however, did not steamroll over the standard upon which ActionScript is based, and most of the language fundamentals remain intact. With the intention to focus on new ActionScript 3.0 options later on, we want to cover some of the more important fundamentals up-front. We do not intend to ignore these ideas throughout the rest of the book. However, because they are ...
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I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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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.