Essential ActionScript 3.0--New from O'Reilly: Learning from Master Programmer Colin Moock

Sebastopol, CA--More than two years in the making, ActionScript 3.0--perhaps the most substantial upgrade to Flash's programming language ever--is here. And O'Reilly's newest offering, Essential ActionScript 3.0 (O'Reilly, $54.99 US), stands ready to guide developers at every level through this radically overhauled update.

Guided by expert author Colin Moock--who turned Essential ActionScript 2.0 into the top resource choice for the Flash and ActionScript developer community--this new book provides practical explanations, insightful warnings, and thousands of code examples. Indeed, throughout his new book, Colin--a talented programmer, technologist, and teacher--turns ActionScript inside out, revealing its nuances and capabilities.

"Essential ActionScript 3.0 teaches hundreds of ActionScript's most important concepts, but its loftiest goal is teaching total non-programmers to program, even if they've never programmed before," explains Colin. "To me, it's incredibly exciting knowing that a reader could pick up Essential ActionScript 3.0 without understanding a single line of code, and then 150 pages later produce a functioning ActionScript program."

Adds Colin, "ActionScript 3.0 is the foundation of the entire Flash platform, and plays a critical role in every Flash application. Essential ActionScript 3.0 gives readers the knowledge they need to be a part of the Flash platform's bright future."

Within this book's pages, users will find:

• Exhaustive coverage of the core ActionScript language, including object-oriented programming, classes, objects, variables, methods, functions, inheritance, datatypes, arrays, events, exceptions, scope, namespaces, XML, and security.

• A deep exploration of visual and interactive programming topics, such as the display API, hierarchical event handling, mouse and keyboard interactivity, animation, vector graphics, bitmap graphics, text, and content-loading operations.
• Applied advice on code-production issues, such as combining ActionScript with assets created manually in the Flash authoring tool, using the Flex framework in Flex Builder 2, and creating reusable code libraries.

Essential ActionScript 3.0 offers a wealth of knowledge and experience in one convenient place. For readers who have no prior programming knowledge, this book gently guides them on their journey toward ActionScript proficiency. If they're experienced with ActionScript, this book helps them fill gaps in their knowledge and rethink important concepts in formal terms.

Colin Moock is an independent ActionScript expert whose world-renowned books have educated Flash programmers since 1999. He is the author of the canonical Essential ActionScript 2.0 (O'Reilly, 2004) and ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide (O'Reilly, 2003, 2001). Moock runs one of the web's oldest Flash developer sites, www.moock.org and is the co-creator of Unity, a client/server framework for creating multiuser applications.

Additional Resources:

• More information about the book, including table of contents, index, author bios, and cover graphic

Essential ActionScript 3.0
Tim Patrick and John Clark Craig
Colin Moock
ISBN: 0-596-52694-6, $54.99 US
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