This is the Safari online edition of the printed book.

The fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn ActionScript® 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional

ActionScript® 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book contains 14 lessons. The book covers the basics of learning ActionScript and provides countless tips and techniques to help you become more productive. You can follow the book from start to finish or choose only those lessons that interest you.

Learn to add interactivity to Flash files using ActionScript 3.0: Control timelines and animation, write event-handling functions, and control loading of and interaction with data, text, video, sound, and images.

“The Classroom in a Book series is by far the best training material on the market. Everything you need to master the software is included: clear explanations of each lesson, step-by-step instructions, and the project files for the students.” —Barbara Binder, Adobe Certified Instructor, Rocky Mountain Training

Classroom in a Book®, the best-selling series of hands-on software training workbooks, helps you learn the features of Adobe software quickly and easily. Classroom in a Book offers what no other book or training program does—an official training series from Adobe Systems Incorporated, developed with the support of Adobe product experts.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

Well Done, but not a Cure-All - 2009-08-10
Reviewer Rating:
ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Classroom in a Book

I recently read all chapters and completed all exercises in this book and will give it overall a 4 star rating.

Let me preface by stating I am a Website Designer/Developer and have many years of software development programming experience.

I have little criticism for the book except for Adobes' Getting Started Prerequisites stating "This book assumes no programming experience". In the book they use an example such as:

function moveUp(e:Event):void {
if (jt0.position.y>165) {
var pt0:Point=new Point(jt.position.x-5,jt0.position.y-5);
move0.moveTo(pt0);
} else {
..............it goes on
}
}

If the above looks like language from another planet and you expect to learn the fundamentals, details, concepts and functionality, it's not going to happen in this book. Another review I read regarding this book was by a community college student who gave it a 2 star rating for that reason. The review stated "I have made little progress towards understanding the fundamentals of this programming language". Enough said. A suggestion would be to first learn Javascript. Actionscript 3.0 syntax is very similar.

Now for the good news. If you're someone who already has programming basics under your belt, this book is recommended. In my quest for comprehending Actionscript 3.0 (which has deprecated Actionscript 2.0), I have done sample downloads, reverse engineering analysis and classroom seminars. These unstructured methods did provide knowledge of specific code techniques but was not a great way to go as far as a total learning process. However, this book provided the missing link. The classroom teaching style of writing and related exercises pulled everything together.

The book did an excellent job of classroom style instruction. In this book expect spend an average of 35-40 hours to do all the exercises. The best part about this book is that it is written with true professional teaching methodology. (I have had experience in classroom program instruction and would endorse it in a classroom environment with proper prerequisites)

The Adobe Certified Teaching Team did a very good job. Lessons are build upon information from previous chapters and special sidebar notes are inserted that help pull the whole topic together. There are 14 lessons on a CD covering an array of applications, but don't expect them to cover everything Actionscript can do. One exercise covered working with a live webcam and was a fun project. Lessons don't include building the graphics used in the exercises, just the coding to make it perform the task.

You will need Flash CS4 to do all lessons, but you can use Flash CS3 in the beginning. In CS4, some classes and methods used in exercises apparently are not compatible with CS3. An error occurs when you try to load these files. By producing this book, Adobe seems to have found a clever way to further market the CS4 upgrade.

By doing some of the exercises with CS3, this can buy you some time if you don't want to jump into CS4. When you open an exercise, it will load or give you an error message. Those with an error message require CS4. You can then go to [...] and download a free Flash CS4 30 trial. Just be sure you allocate enough time to complete the remaining lessons in this 30 day period.

David R Beasley

Pretty good for non-programmers - 2009-05-28
Reviewer Rating:
Flash action script is heavy duty complicated especially for a non-programmer. I like how this book breaks it down with actual lessons that you perform using the DVD step by step.

Excellent Actionscript 3.0 study book - 2009-06-25
Reviewer Rating:
This book is just the right pace to learn actionscript 3.0.
It takes you through the code step by step with explanations all the way. Not like other books that tell you what to write down without telling you why.
There are a few mistakes in the book and the software examples but I found those errors actually helped me understand the code better. Had it not been for the author explaining all the way, I would not have been able to troubleshoot. It did not take me long to find the mistakes due to the explanations in the book and by the time I had found the mistakes, I knew the code thoroughly.
I also have tried reading a lot of other actionscript books and either it was too little information or too much. Both ways I was getting thoroughly confused. After this book, a much more advanced book "essential Actionscript 3.0" now seems very easy to grasp.
I highly recommend this book.
Marc Chelin

CD Files are corrupt - 2009-06-25
Reviewer Rating:
FYI...once you get to chapter 7 the tutorial files no longer open. We purchased several copies of the book for our graphic department at work and none of the CDs work after Chapter 7. Very discouraging!

Great tutorial book - 2009-08-14
Reviewer Rating:
As a designer, I am continually keeping up with new media and this book makes it easy.
Once you have a basic knowledge of flash, this book is a great next step for more in-depth learning.

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