Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: In response to bad reviews...
Comment: I think far too many people are used to reading For Dummies or Head Start books and they have forgotten how to learn. The few low scores this book has received are due to a couple of factors: 1. The readers don't have the mental capacity to grasp the concepts. 2. They're trying to read through the book without memorizing keywords and concepts (this lead someone to refer to the nomenclature as technical jargon which it is not). 3. They want to start creating immediately and jump right into applicable content instead of starting off with the basics and building on them.
This is by far the most precise programming book I've ever read. I love his clear and concise style of writing and simple definitions. It is NOT a "For Idiots" style book. Moock Defines keywords in one sentence. It is imperative that you memorize the keywords and concepts before moving on. Work through the code until you understand it. I spent about 50-60 hours in the first 6 chapters.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Seems rushed
Comment: I really like Colin Moock's work, his first book on Actionscripting, taught me how to program in Flash and was a great primer for learning scripting, The book on AS 2 was a bit duller to get through and not quite as informative, but it was still OK. This book however, is an absolute pain to get through, it is disjointed and has you doing tons of stuff with no reasoning behind it, the script samples are crude and don't stand alone like they did in the first two books. I don't recommend this book at all. I am looking for something better that will go back to the basics like the first book did. This one assumes "you know" many things already.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good for beginners
Comment: AS3 really came as a shock to me, because I never wanted to become a programmer. I am a designer, and I enjoy working with color and pattern. But, I needed to be able to use Flash CS3, so I reluctantly decided to dive in. I tried the online courses, I went to an expensive classroom with an Adobe certified teacher, and I picked up a couple other books, and all these things helped even though they also caused a lot of frustration. This book just states the rules in the first half, and it's tough to get through, but it's doable, even for a beginner, if you can take a deep breath and relax, and you need to read this stuff, so you have a general knowledge of how the language works. It's like learning a new foreign language. It's boring to read the rules of grammar, but you need to get the hang of it, try it out, see how it sounds, and even if you skim Part 1, it's valuable. Part 2 gets into display techniques, and you need these as well. Part 3 prepares you for entrance into a field of professionals. Don't give in to frustration. Just read the book. It won't be the most pleasant thing you ever did, but it'll be well worth doing. Given what the author was attempting to do, I can't imagine it being done any better.
Customer Rating:
Summary: All over the place, and nowhere, at once.
Comment: I read a lot of programming books. I write a lot of code. I have more programming experience than I care to admit, over a dozen languages under my belt, 16 I am almost sure. So I think I am qualified, at least as a consumer, to criticize this book.
I am, however, somewhat new to Flash, ActionScript, et al. Actually I think that helps my perspective, rather than hurts it.
The title contains the word "Essential". I don't think it is, and I also think that connotes "fundamental" and could lead newbie programmers to extrapolate that to "ActionScript 101". Beginning programmers or AS2 scripters should not buy this book if that is what you are looking for, because it is well into intermediate programming territory and that alone will cause you unnecessary trouble. Get a more fundamental book like Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginners Guide by Shupe and Rosser. You will learn more faster by starting there.
Advanced programmers with backgrounds in other languages looking for a pure and complete treatment of the language might be disappointed to find out just how incomplete this text is. The author spends as much time referring you to the official Adobe documentation as he does writing about the subject of the book, AS3. If you want to argue that ActionScript 3.0 is too large and too complex to cover in a single volume, let me tell you, C# is much more complex than ActionScript 3.0 and Andrew Troelsen pinned C# to the ground in a single large book in a very clear and readable way.
The author doesn't seem to have clearly delineated who his expected readers were before he wrote this. Some of the material is for coders new to OOP, other chapters jump into heady stuff for advanced programmers, then drops back to intermediate level material, back to basics, then advanced, bouncing around like yo-yo all over the place, but giving nothing a complete treatment.
The coverage of E4X was excellent. The chapter on namespaces was incoherent. Back and forth, back and forth for almost 1000 pages. By the end, I was convinced that I would have spent my time more fruitfully by just reading the Adobe documentation and skipping this book.
Another gripe, that I can also make about many other programming books, is that since this is an update to an earlier work, by now all of the text should have been squeeky clean, but it is not. It contains errors, typos, etc. Unacceptable for a book is an update of an earlier work.
Is this book useful or relevant at all? Yes, but only in the way that listening one half of a phone conversation is; you can learn some things from it, but either have to make a lot of educated guesses about things or pick up an extension to hear the other party before you have a completely formed understanding of the subject.
One last thing should be said, and this applies to far too many books today. Commerce is destroying both art and science. Holy wars rage on between the largest companies that sell products to programmers and users alike, and trickles down to the rival factions of developers and writers that support each of them. Case in point: How does one write a 1000 page tome of a derivative of the C language and not once mention C#? The author mentions C, C++, Java, and JavaScript but patently refuses to put the characters "C" and "#" together in any sentence of this book. Raise your hands, how many people program in "C" today? Now how many program in C#? Point made.
Programming is at least as much art as science. For software developers, having an opposable thumb is not as important as having the capacity for abstract thought. And yet in the huge mass of written material and training sources of every kind, we now have divided ourselves into camps. Either you are a Microsoft supporter, or you are everyone else. Why is this? Why feign ignorance of C# when clearly it is both derivative of every C based language before it, and an improvement on all of them?
In terms of sheer numbers, there ultimately be more C# programmers than Java programmers who will make the effort to learn ActionScript as it evolves. That may already be the case. Is it wise to ignore them when you are attempting to gain critical mass for ActionScript/Flash/Flex/AIR? You already know the answer to that.
It is naive to think that this fracturing of the programming community is going to cease anytime soon, if ever, but it is a shame. Programming is hard enough without vendors making matters worse by promoting the Us vs Them mentality. We have to make all of this stuff work together in our concrete applications because no language or product is an island, especially given how the internet is evolving. _We_ have to connect the dots, but the firms selling us our tools are intentionally making that difficult to do for competitive reasons. Adobe is not going to put Microsoft out of the language compiler business. Microsoft is not going to put Adobe out of the rich content tool creation business. I am not saying "why can't we all just get along?", I am saying go sit in the corner for a time-out and stop making my work hard just to line your pockets. It is funny how the harder Microsoft tries to change its ways and be more of a team player, the more other companies adopt Microsoft's most heavy-handed tactics from 5-10 year ago. Yes you Adobe, Google, Apple. Rather than waste time money and energy giving me Flash/Flex/Air and their contradictions and absence of a cohesive programming model, give me a killer, native Windows IDE that rivals Visual Studio 2008, and one uniform way to write all ActionScript apps. FlexBuilder 3 isn't close to what I am looking for. Don't concentrate your resources on fighting Microsoft because they scare you, just give me great tools to work with and I will use them. That would not only help developers, but it would also help authors like Mr. Moock by making his job easier as well.
Consider buying this book after you understand ActionScript 3.0 pretty well, and haven't found adequate coverage on specific things like E4X. Just know that by then, a large part of this book will be a rehash for you. Essential ActionScript 4.0, when that is written, will hopefully show that the author has made a decision about who his audience really is. It does include C# programmers, likely many more than you might think. But just as importantly, the author should consider the level of programmer he wants to write for. If he want to address us all, I recommend that he takes a good look at Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform. Writing a well rounded treatment of any programming language is not an easy task by any stretch of the imagination, but it can be done.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Action Script Bible
Comment: The detailed instructions of this manual make easy to understand these extremely complex concept. I think all programming manuals should be written like this one.
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