Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 (Foundation)

Features

• Cover Type: Paperback with 648 pages
• Published by: friends of ED
• Edition: 1st Edition April 10, 2006
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 1590596188
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-1590596180
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 7.5 x 1.4 inches
• Weighs: 2.2 pounds

Product Description
ActionScript is the native scripting language of Flash. ActionScript knowledge is essential within the world of Flash design and development, as Flash remains a leading tool for cutting-edge interactive design and development. ActionScript is what gives Flash its power, but with that power comes a certain level of complexity, which can be intimidating. This beginners book, significantly updated since the last edition, covers all of the basics of ActionScript using the latest version of Flash, Flash 8. The skills acquired by working through this book will enable you to move on to more advanced friends of ED books such as Foundation PHP 5 for Flash, Foundation ActionScript Animation or Foundation XML for Flash. This book contains all you need to understand and make use of ActionScript, and to have some fun while learning. The Foundation series teaching style is ideal if youre a non-programmer who wants to learn Flash programming quickly and thoroughly. The authors teach the basics, and provide you an all-around proficiency in ActionScript, as well as Flash components within Flash 8. Youll gain the practical skills to build ActionScript based Flash projects, including making initial design decisions, structuring code, and testing. An ongoing case study means that by the end of the book, youll have constructed a cutting-edge Flash site to showcase your newly learned skills. Summary of Contents:

• Chapter 1 Interactive Flash
• Chapter 2 Making Plans
• Chapter 3 Movies That Remember
• Chapter 4 Movies That Decide for Themselves
• Chapter 5 More Power, Less Script
• Chapter 6 Movies That Remember How to Do Things
• Chapter 7 Objects and Classes
• Chapter 8 Objects on the Stage
• Chapter 9 Reusable Code and Realistic Movement
• Chapter ten Games and Sprites
• Chapter 11 Drawing API
• Chapter 12 Adding Sound to Flash
• Chapter 13 Loading Dynamic Data with XML
• Chapter 14 Finishing the Futuremedia Case Study
• Chapter 15 Advanced ActionScript: Components and Classes

About The Author
Sham Bhangal has worked on books in new media for 3 years, in which time he has authored and coauthored numerous friends of ED books, including critically acclaimed, award-winning, and bestselling titles such as Foundation Flash, New Masters of Flash, Flash MX Upgrade Essentials, Flash MX Most Wanted, and Flash MX Designer's ActionScript Reference,



Bhangal has considerable experience working with Macromedia and Adobe products, as well as other general web design technologies (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.). In addition to speaking appearances at FlashForward (the largest Macromedia Flash developer conference), Bhangal has long been a beta tester for Macromedia and Discreet products.

Kristian Besley currently works as a freelance author and Flash/web developer, specializing in interactivity and dynamic-driven content. He has written a number of books on Flash, including Foundation Flash MX, Flash MX Video, and Learn Design with Flash MX. He is also a contributor to Computer Arts magazine. In 2002, his website, www.graphci.com, hosted the first ever worldwide competition on HTML-based TableArt, which Kristian himself describes as "pictures, designs, or creations made with the fantasmagorical technology of tables in HTML." The entries of last year's competition are viewable at www.graphci.com/tableart. Kristian can be reached at besley@ntlworld.com.

David Powers is an Adobe Community Expert for Dreamweaver and author of a series of highly successful books on PHP, including PHP Solutions: Dynamic Web Design Made Easy (friends of ED, ISBN-13: 978-1-59059-731-6) and Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8 (friends of ED, ISBN-13: 978-1-59059-569-5). As a professional writer, he has been involved in electronic media for more than thirty years, first with BBC radio and television and more recently with the Internet. His clear writing style is valued not only in the English-speaking world; several of his books have been translated into Spanish and Polish.

What started as a mild interest in computing was transformed almost overnight into a passion, when David was posted to Japan in 1987 as BBC correspondent in Tokyo. With no corporate IT department just down the hallway, he was forced to learn how to fix everything himself. When not tinkering with the innards of his computer, he was reporting for BBC TV and radio on the rise and collapse of the Japanese bubble economy. Since leaving the BBC to work independently, he has built up an online bilingual database of economic and political analysis for Japanese clients of an international consultancy.

When not pounding the keyboard writing books or dreaming of new ways of using PHP and other programming languages, David enjoys nothing better than visiting his favorite sushi restaurant. He has also translated several plays from Japanese.

Reader Reviews
Although this book is ostensibly a "beginner" book on Flash Actionscript (no previous programming experience necessary), I got more out of this book than you can imagine, and I'm not done with it yet. I've already got a few favorite pages that I come back to again and again. What struck me right off the bat was that this book wasn't code-heavy, but had much more in the way of explanations than most books, which was exactly what I have been seeking for a long time now. Then, as I got into it, I realized this book was changing my whole way of thinking about coding with Flash Actionscript, and it's because of their heavy stress on "modular" coding techniques. The authors call it "black box" programming and making "building blocks" of code. It's really encapsulation. Whatever you want to call it, they back it up with solid examples. The demonstration of the apply() method on pages 360 and 361 was alone worth the price of the book! On pages 308 and 309, there's an example of making a movie clip containing video controls that you can just drag and drop into any movie, and bingo! you've got a set of controls for that movie (play, stop, pause, fastforward, rewind). Again, the idea is that if you build something once, you should be able to reuse it, with minor tweaking here and there. Chapter 10, Games & Sprites, is really cool! There's a fully functioning "zapper" arcade-type video game with a complete explanation of the rationale behind how something like that is designed and coded, and what variables should be global, which ones belong on _root, and which should stay local to each object (All of the examples in the book can be downloaded from the publisher's website, BTW. In fact, you can download the examples even if you haven't yet bought the book). Although a lot of the stuff in the earlier chapters is very basic, taking you through stuff like variables, arrays, loops, conditionals, etc, the stress on modularity is woven throughout. The main idea that you come away with (certainly the central idea of the book) is that it's worth the time it takes to design and plan something modularly. Even though at first it does take longer, in the end you wind up with something that's WAY easier to modify. Now, I say all that from my own perspective, and I'm probably an intermediate level programmer. So maybe the stuff I'm saying about this book and it's stress on modularity would be old hat to a pro. I don't know. Then again, I've got about 8 books on Actionscript, each one having stuff unique to itself, and this one has things in it that just aren't to be found in the others. All through the book, there's also an ongoing project for building a modular Flash website. I haven't gotten into working along with that yet, but I'm sure I will eventually (I've had the book about a month). In any case, they add a little more to the project at the end of each chapter, so that it progresses into more advanced stuff at about the same pace as the rest of the book. There's a basic introduction to classes and oop in the last chapter. It should be understood that it's not extensive, and that's not the focus of this book anyway. It does tie in with the stress on modularity, and there's good explanations of when and how you might use classes in your programming. But if want material specifically about classes, there are other books that make that their focus. To sum up: I would recommend this book for beginner to intermediate programmers. Although much of the stuff in the earlier chapters will probably be a rehash of what you already know, the stress on modularity is there from the beginning, and there is good material throughout. If you've heard about modular code and code reuse, but never really seen good examples of it, open this book to some of the pages I mentioned above (308, 356, 360, 361, 364) and see if any of it registers an "aha" moment. Also, if you're looking for a bit less code and lot more explanation about techniques, get this book. I also recommend "Foundation Actionscript Animation: Making Things Move" by Keith Peters, from the same publisher.