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The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide
Book Review

8 January 2009

by Huw Collingbourne

The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide
$34.99 / £24.99
by David Stiller, Rich Shupe, Jen deHaan, Darren Richardson
O’Reilly: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517359/
Computer Bookshops: http://www.compman.co.uk/
491 pages
ISBN 10: 0-596-51735-1
ISBN 13: 9780596517359

Doorstopper programming tomes are all very well in moderation. But I have to say that I am generally favourably disposed towards books that deal with their subject briefly and without waffle. So O’Reilly’s ‘ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide’ (which is about the size of a P. D. James novel) looks like just my kind of book.

As its title indicates, the ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide deals exclusively with version 3.0 of ActionScript, which is the object oriented programming language at the heart of Flex and Flash development. However, it has special help for programmers (and artists) who have previous experience of the much simpler (not object oriented) versions (1 and 2) of ActionScript.

In fact, the general emphasis of the book is on helping people who are having problems with mastering ActionScript 3.0 and, to a large extent, that means people who are likely to be using ActionScript predominantly to script their Flash graphics. The assumption is that ActionScript development will be done using Adobe’s Flash CS4 authoring IDE rather than a Flex development environment. Accordingly there is very little about Flex specifically in this book but a great deal about Flash.

After dealing with the fundamentals of ActionScript 3.0, the book moves on to working with ActionScript inside the Flash IDE. It then covers specific programming topics such as drawing graphics, creating visual objects using code, working with events such as mouse clicks and key presses and working with ‘external assets’ such as style sheets, images, sounds and videos.

If you are a Flash developer struggling with ActionScript 3, this guide should help you get over a few of the hurdles. If you are a more experienced programmer, you will probably find the in-depth coverage of ActionScript in Colin Mook’s book, ‘Essential ActionScript 3.0’ to be more satisfactory. And don’t forget to read Adobe’s excellent free PDF eBooks on ActionScript and Flex development including the invaluable ‘Programming ActionScript 3.0‘.