Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: One of the best AS3 resources around
Comment: I subscribe to [...] which is one of the best investments I have ever made. They have video tutorials on all sorts of software and subjects, among other things ActionScript 3.
I find the book "Learning ActionScript 3.0: A beginner's guide" to be an excellent complement to the Lynda videos. The book covers some basic AS concepts such as loops and conditional statements and progresses into Classes etc. It covers video, audio and the stuff that you need to get started with AS3.
The only bad thing is that there are some minor errors in the code, but there is a accompanying website that gives you the corrections. It is hard to let go of the book and it joins me to bed, to my girlfriend's dismay.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A total must have if you want to understand and learn actionScript3.0
Comment: I haven't get to the end yet, but until now, I love this book, is really nice to read, the authors can explain complex matters so easily and just bring a big light over aspects that where dark to me before this book.
I am being able to understand so clearly the new concepts of actionScript 3.0 and use what they teach in real life projects.
If you want to learn easily, then this is your book.
This is the opinion of a graphic designer who has been just playing with actionScript 2.0 for long time, but never was able to understand clearly the Class concept, now, after this book I can, and I have to :)
Great teachers are the authors, thank you Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser!
Customer Rating:
Summary: The more I read it, the more I hate it.
Comment: First, please note that many of the 5-star reviews are written by experienced Flash professionals, who already have actionscript expertise -- and that makes them poor judges of how clear this book will be to a beginning audience.
The book is explicitly written for beginners, but the authors often have a poor grasp on what readers know. On one page they start talking about "trapping" events. What does that mean? Who knows?
I have a good math background, so I was able to decipher the math chapter, but it contains explanations like, "A radian is the angle of a circle subtended by an arc along its circumference that is the length of the circle's radius (hence the name, radian)." What's the point of writing a sentence like that? Will it be understood by anyone who doesn't already know what a radian is? Has a math newbie even ever heard the word "subtend"? This casual use of undefined jargon happens in every chapter.
Also, sometimes they're just wrong. They say that a ball moving 4 pixels to the right and 4 pixels down per second will have a velocity of 4 pixels per second in a south southeast direction. No. The Pythagorean theorem (which they explain, badly, in the next section), says the ball will be moving more than 5.6 pixels per second. And the direction is southeast.
The book really is full of typos, and they're not all caught in the errata. The only way to know if the code is correct is to to go the website and download the code being discussed in the book. The files you download will have the correct code (though before you check the code, as you're reading the book you're thinking, "Do I not understand, or is this code wrong?") Unfortunately, the book sometimes refers to these files by the wrong name, so you have to figure out which file to open. That's really inexcusable -- how hard would it be for the authors to go to their own website and correctly name the files?
Another random, infuriating example of the book's sloppiness: on page 144, the authors state a line of code "g.curveTo(275, 0, 400, 100);". In the context of the chapter, the hardest part of this code to understand is the "275, 0" and it's the one part they don't bother to explain!
And as long as I'm ranting (I just threw the book down to come and write this), the authors often put unnecessary lines into the code. I'm left trying to figure it out, wondering, "Why did they put that there? Is it necessary?" so I try the code without the extra material, and it still works fine. But the authors never explain why it's there, so while you're trying to learn to read actionscript, wanting to understand the importance of each line and its relationship to the rest of the example, you're thinking, "Am I just missing the importance of this line? Or does it have no importance?" Learners shouldn't be left to wonder those things!
It's a maddening book, full of unexplained terminology (I just found the phrase, "dedicated canvas"; huh?), incomplete explanations, bloated code, and many, many errors.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I like it
Comment: After reading the other reviews I decided to give this book a try and I don't regret it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Did anyone proof this book? Way too many typos.
Comment: I'm surprised a book by O'Reilly was released with this many typos. I've been going through it and typing the tutorials that were new material for me. The amount of mistakes is just unacceptable, especially that many times it happens in code. The code is correct in the examples from their web site which begs the question, why didn't they just cut and paste it from the WORKING examples? The errata on their web site has a few of the mistakes but I've found many more.
Anyway, apart from the ridiculous number of typos it is an OK book. I don't think its the be-all Flash book like some people on here that have been raving, but it is a good stepping stone book to learning some OOP. Its very practical and eases you from timeline code into classes. Most Flash books seem to go all timeline or all OOP, so good job to them for understanding their audience. Another knock I have is that in many examples they try to show you additional techniques apart from the main thing they are trying to illustrate. Normally I would applaud this because you just learn more, but too often here it just confuses. My last issue with the book is that it sometimes fails to explain an important element of code or give you a really vague explanation, even if that is the purpose of the exercise! Personally I want to know why I'm typing every line in so I can be more flexible when I write my own code, as opposed to blindly memorizing and hoping I remember it when I need it.
All in all, you won't go wrong with this one, but it is by no means perfect. It could've been great. Its not. But its still good and worth a purchase.
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