Teaching yourself ActionScript: Books I recommend

I've been using Flash and ActionScript (never forgetting JAVA, PYTHON, and all my other favorite languages of course) since late this summer, and I've been surprised as to how quickly I've learned it. It's a great feeling, knowing that you can achieve something without having to have someone hold your hand all the way through. Fortunately, ActionScript is a lot like JAVA, so having some experience there made AS3 a lot less difficult to learn(I actually find AS3 more convenient than JAVA). There are three books that gave me the Flash know-how:

1) ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University by Gary Rosenzweig:

Good reference book, though this would not be the book I recommend for a completely new programmer. Most of the book is just a collection of tutorials, making it a bit harder for the new guy to grasp all of the core concepts 1st. However, there is some great depth to this book and it touches on some fantastically deep topics like 3D racing, mapping, and so on.



2) Game design with Flash by Rex van der Spuy:

This is the 2nd Flash book I read, and I really wish it was the first. It is perfect for beginners, and the first 5 chapters laid out the basics of ActionScript really nicely. The rest of the book was still a good read, and touched on topics that other books missed like using trigonometry to find the angle of an object and use it to fire bullets, missiles, or glowing smiley faces.



3) Creating a Web Site with Flash CS4 by David Morris:

A good primer with Flash, this book is a fun, short, and easy read that a ferret could understand*. However, this book lacks the code power needed to run a truly good Flash site. For instance, Morris shows the reader how to make a form by dragging text boxes out from the side bar** and place them on the design. However, he ends the section abruptly saying, "To function properly and transfer data as intended, a form requires advanced ActionScript programming and connection to a database- complexity that is beyond the scope of this book." (122) Which is a really fancy way of saying, "I have no idea how to do this, but I can teach you how to draw a text box!"

Regardless, this book is sufficient for the beginning Flash designer, and I still got a lot out of it.






Footnotes:


*: Why hire people to build Flash sites anyway? Timone and Pumba will do it for half the cost.
**: Hey, don't laugh. Clicking and dragging is an art.