Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Falls short of the Cookbook quality, outdated
Comment: I've been a fan of programmer's cookbooks ever since the famous Perl Cookbook ages ago. It's a great way to get into a language and do away with any nagging thoughts that maybe you didn't solve a problem well.
This specific cookbook falls short, though. I tried to read it cover to cover as well as individual chapters, but I found it oddly balanced. For example, the authors waste three recipes on about 10 pages about generating a random number (which is just one command!), and then describe event handling (the big thing!) on half a page. I also find it strange to read about trigonometry in a programmer's book, and I don't think recipes work very well for explaining basic language features (such as how to create a new object, or how to "trace a message").
Mostly though, the book is outdated with the release of flex2/3. Yes, Actionscript 3 is still current, but you don't roll your own buttons as subclasses of sprite anymore!
In short, I give it three stars for content, and subtract 1 for being outdated. If you want to read about Actionscript 3, Adobe has a very nicely outlined pdf online, which is an easy read compared to these confusing and stale recipes.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A must-have book for those who want to get up to speed - fast!
Comment: For those of us who have experience in many programming languages (C, C++, C#, JAVA etc.) who were introduced to flash and to actionscript (2.0/3.0) - I HIGHLY recommend this book as your first choice! - it'll get you up to speed in a matter of a week or two!
I highly recommend taking some time aside and read it thoroughly. This is the best cookbook I've ever read. Very clear, well organized, easy to understand - you name it! In fact, I don't know whether to consider it as a cookbook - as it is by all means an excellent learning textbook as well!!!
If you wanna be an actionscript 3.0 stud - start with this book.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent for beginner/intermediate
Comment: Excellent format: Q&A. Helps you find the syntax that you need and the solution for the most common problems you encounter programming AS3.
Anyway it's not supposed to be complete and covering everything. I would recommend to a beginner/intermediate, specially to a previous AS2.0 developer like me. Cheers.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The title should be FLEX ActionScript 3.0
Comment: I bought this book because I wanted to learn how to use AS3 over AS2. This book claims to be a ActionScript 3.0 which it is, but ONLY if you have the Flex Application.
I don't have Adobe Flex but I would like to learn ActionScript 3.0 - this is too advanced for me and the applications aren't what I thought they would be.
This book may be good for advanced users of ActionScript but for someone like me who was just getting used to ActionScript 2.0 and wants to learn how AS3 works- it's the worst book you can buy.
As much as I like O'Reilly books, I feel this book is misleading.
Novice to Advanced users may think otherwise.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Poor Sequel to Actionscript Cookbook
Comment: Here's an example of why this book deserves just one star (if that!):
Cre{2}l matches creel but not crel or creel
This example was taken from the section on regular expressions. There are other inaccuracies on that page. Overall, this book is riddled with inadequate, poor explanations that appear to typify the worse of IT personnel - bad communications skills. Anyone who gives this book high marks has not read the book entirely and is relying only on reputation.
Here's another example:
var example:RegExp = /(\d)abc(\d*)/;
var result:Array = example.exec( "7abc" );
// Displays: 3
trace( result.length );
// Displays: 7abc
trace( result[0] );
// Displays: 7
trace( result[1] );
// Displays:
trace( result[2] );
Notice that the last display is missing. Really sloppy work. Not convinced? Try it at your own peril.
Skip this book.
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