Customer Rating: 
Summary: Sweet Receipies
Comment: This is how more how-to books should be written. Action Script is the real power behind putting zoom and power into Flash projects, but with its full feature set it can be intimidating to learn how to use properly and many books fail in really explaining the why and how or fail to give any practical real world examples and quickly go off the deep end on wordy explinations of the syntax leaving you hanging, wanting some practical how do I USE what I just read.This book is different! Its loaded with PRACTICAL, useful well commented examples of USING the code explained with hundreds of code snipets that you can use immidiately as-is or with little modification. Starts with simpler things like lucid explainations of common pitfalls of checking equality and comparing values to if else expressions, while loops, more complex conditional testing then moves into areas most newbies want to learn how to do, but don't really have any practical examples like how to change a movie's transparency, drawing tricks, masking, etc.. Then it moves into examples of arrays, targeting, making objects dragable, swapping levels, interaction with buttons, validating forms and so on. The book is well written and while there is plenty of technical information it never gets bogged down under the weight of excessive theory, minutia on details you'll rarely use and quickly forget anyway. Its much more of a friendly 'how do I do this' kind of approach that probably will make you reach for it again and again as a quick reference to solve common problems. The last 200 pages or so give details of several more meaty projects. Unlike several books that 'explain' Action Script but all too often leave you hanging on how to actual use it, here you see how to use it in real world conditions which will save you hours of frustrating trial and error.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This cookbook has sweet Action Script recipies
Comment: This is how more how-to books should be written. Action Script is the real power behind putting zoom and power into Flash projects, but with its full feature set it can be intimidating to learn how to use properly and many books fail in really explaining the why and how or fail to give any practical real world examples and quickly go off the deep end on wordy explinations of the syntax leaving you hanging, wanting some practical how do I USE what I just read.This book is different! Its loaded with PRACTICAL, useful well commented examples of USING the code explained with hundreds of code snipets that you can use immidiately as-is or with little modification. Starts with simpler things like lucid explainations of common pitfalls of checking equality and comparing values to if else expressions, while loops, more complex conditional testing then moves into areas most newbies want to learn how to do, but don't really have any practical examples like how to change a movie's transparency, drawing tricks, masking, etc.. Then it moves into examples of arrays, targeting, making objects dragable, swapping levels, interaction with buttons, validating forms and so on. The book is well written and while there is plenty of technical information it never gets bogged down under the weight of excessive theory, minutia on details you'll rarely use and quickly forget anyway. Its much more of a friendly 'how do I do this' kind of approach that probably will make you reach for it again and again as a quick reference to solve common problems. The last 200 pages or so give details of several more meaty projects. Unlike several books that 'explain' Action Script but all too often leave you hanging on how to actual use it, here you see how to use it in real world conditions which will save you hours of frustrating trial and error.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: excellent companion
Comment: I said "excellent companion" in the title since I think it goes hand in hand with Moock's excellent "definitive guide".I am a C, Perl programmer, and have started developing programs in ActionScript and since it has its own peculiarities (and not all that well documented) it is useful to see them included in specific examples. I found the parts on Flash Remoting quite helpful in giving me ideas and practical solutions. I could not in all honesty give it 5 stars since I was not as happy with his extensive reliance on components. I do not find them very convenient if I am developing with ActionScript (in fact even when using Flash I have sometimes found it easier to write a short script for movie clips rather than configuring and adapting ready made components).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Perfect companion
Comment: This book travels almost everywhere with me, along with Colin Moock's ASDG2. Where ASDG2 stops Joey Lott picks up the pieces and assembles them into practical and useful examples that can be directly applied to everyday projects.The Actionscript Cookbook should be a part of any developers library. Joey Lott's books consistently impress me as I've also found the Complete Flash Remoting to be invaluable to have around.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Code Examples Work Well
Comment: As the editor of the book, please allow me to respond to two inaccurate reviews...
In response to C. A. TBF's review of May 26, 2005 ("Too Many Examples DO NOT WORK"), I'd suggest he contact O'Reilly tech support (booktech (at) oreilly.com). As you can tell from the other reviews, other readers are not having the same problem. The code examples have all been thoroughly reviewed and the few errata are posted on O'Reilly's catalog page for the book. The code examples work. The reviewer must have forgotten to do something basic, like give a name to a movie clip using the Property inspector. If he writes to me or O'Reilly, we'll gladly help him solve any problems.
In other news...I have to take issue with the anonymous, 3-star review of December 23, 2003 entitled "An OK book for programmers"
A single book can't be perfect for every level of reader, but the near-unanimous 5-star reviews tell us we did a pretty good job. Certainly, there are occasional examples that mirror things that can be found in the documentation, because we strove to make the book as complete as possible. But I'd strongly disagree with the reviewer's statement that "A lot of the examples are obvious explanations of the AS documentation." The vast majority of the recipes are neither obvious nor found in the documentation.
Likewise, it is true that how to loop through an array should be known by skilled programmers, but the book also targets Flashers less familiar with ActionScript. Not every recipe is intended for every reader.
Lastly, the reviewer says that "Seemingly usefull [sic] functions, like recursively stopping everything in a MovieClip, are missing." Whereas it is true that the book cannot possibly cover every scenario, Recipe 7.10 describes how to recursively traverse the movie clip hierarchy to access nested clips. Furthermore, Recipe 7.3 discusses how to control playback, including stopping a movie clip. Any skilled programmer, as the reviewer purports to be, could easily combine those two techniques to achieve the desired goal. Had the reviewer written to O'Reilly or the author for technical support, we would have gladly clarified the situation for him (or her).
As a matter of principle, I have never before reviewed a book I've edited, but I felt obligated to point out the inaccuracies in the preceding review. Please forgive me, but I think the book is worth all of 5 stars.
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