Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: confusing
Comment: I had a really tough time with this book. The explanations are inadequate and often very confusing. I found Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe much easier to understand. This book might be a nice reference for people who have some AS3 under their belt, I haven't tried using it for that purpose, but if you need a way into AS3, this book will frustrate you. Perkins may be good at programming, but a teacher he is not. He's completely out of touch with what it's like to be a creative person trying to learn programming and he has no idea how to bridge that gap. He's a computer geek, not a communicator. Shupe is better.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Twisted Review
Comment: I purchased this book expecting to get a good grasp on Actionscript 3.0 by the time I was finished. After going through 3/4 of the book, and exercises, I finally stopped.
Let me first mention what I have found/do find nice in this book.
1. On pages 4-5 there is a nice comparison between AS2 & AS3. Top-notch. I have not encountered another example as clear as this. Since then I have purchased 5 more major references to AS3 and none of them are as clear to me as this.
2. The operator & function list (p.55-56) is the best quick reference I have found yet.
3. The same goes for the accepted sound formats (p.297).
4. Having found an easier book to learn AS from scratch "Learning ActionScript 3.0 - A beginner's Guide". Now I value this book for my ability to find sample code quickly.
That being said...I had a very rough time learning with this book. The supposedly helpful explanations (on pages 29, 41, 49, 65, 133) are more confusing than helpful. Some better analogy would have served his purpose better. I hope this is changed in future revisions.
Another difficulty was that for each section, the book repeatedly uses the same illustration. This makes it difficult to learn.
This is not a beginner's book. But, after you get some AS under your belt, this book sure makes a decent reference.
Customer Rating:
Summary: good starter book
Comment: great book for starters. I write java code so I can understand alot of it. BUT if yr new to the subject....purcahse it, read it and start playing with objects via AS 3.0
Customer Rating:
Summary: This will get your feet wet, but it's not rigorous.
Comment: Knowing nothing about Actionscript and having pitifully little programming experience, I turned to this book as a first step in learning Actionscript. It is very much part of the "Type this, click that" teaching method, which is great for getting your feet wet. You read through and do the exercises and stuff happens on the screen. The author includes some detail about Actionscript, but he doesn't discuss anything in depth. I found myself wanting more information in just about every exercise.
For example, the book includes an exercise for making a sort of word game. The program has arrays of names, verbs, and nouns. The interface also has inputs for adding words to the arrays. When the player presses the "generate" button, the program is supposed to fill in the blanks with words from the lists. Unfortunately, I found that the program frequently fails to generate a word, leaving a hole in the sentence. I know that can be fixed; but if I want to fix it, I have to do research and fix it myself. The book goes no further.
Along the same line, most of the exercises are empty exercises. The author frequently ends sections with instructions to close the exercise windows without saving the work. Larger projects are not followed from start to finish, either. Everything is broken into bite-sized pieces and pre-digested.
I've never used Lynda products before. While I did get something out of the book, I wouldn't really recommend it because it's not rigorous enough to truly learn Actionscript programming. It's just an introduction. I suppose that's the idea. To get the full education, you have to buy more products and do more exercises. I will look elsewhere for more information and give this book three stars.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Leaves something to be desired
Comment: ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training
I can't understand the glowing reviews that were given by 2 people who were not users. Like all lynda.com training, the book is overly simplistic having you type in code that they give you. I can't for the life of me understand how one can learn action script by this method (especially a beginner). The graphics included on the CD are also very simplistic and after 11 chapters of the same images boring.
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