My review of Colin Moock's Essential Actionscript 2.0 book

This is most definitely late in coming but to be honest I've been itching to write this review for quite some time now. It's unfortunate that due to a lot of projects and less time to get them done in, things like this have been pushed to the side temporarily though not permanently :)

A little background on myself I think to lay the brickwork for the basis of my review. I'm currently working in the middle of Japan, Tokyo as a developer for Flash and Flash Communication Server applications mainly which also interact with server side technologies and databases. I literally build these types of RIA's for a living. Up until this book I was aware of OOP and had a general knowledge of it, but no idea of the true OOP that is out there with classes, interfaces, strong typing, different types of patterns (though I generally use MVC), inheritance and exception handling. I had never used AS2 before this book, which I finished reading about a month or so ago, so no real knowledge of what is in it. I have a small library of Flash books here, and I can say that I am not easily impressed by the writings of most when they start off with "flash started in whatever year as a whatever... blah blah blah". Solid information, with solid examples that work and I can use in the real world are what I look for in a book. This is the base that I will be writing this review from.

To start off in this review, I'd like to say that Colin has once again written a formidable book for the Flash actionscripting community. This book may be a bit slimmer than his last books that he wrote but in my opinion packs a bigger punch. Not only that, it builds on this last book which is great because he was able to reduce redundacy of making readers read the same things they may have already read. If you are looking to get into Actionscript 2.0 then I would most definitely recommend this book.

On to some details if I may. First off I don't think this book is for the faint of heart or complete beginner to actionscript. There are a lot of details crammed into the pages here and if you aren't on your toes throughout the book it's very easy to get a bit lost and have to backtrack to read up on what is being talked about. Not to say it's hard to understand mind you, but the detail is quite high, making intake of all the information a bit tough. Definitely not a book that can be read in one sitting I think. In fact it took me a good 2 weeks to get through it all where I was reasonably sure I knew what was going on. I then ran through it again covering the areas I was unsure of. Finally at this point I can say that it mainly sits on my desk as a great reference of "how does that work again?" kind of idea.

I should say that there is one thing that irked me is that Colin is quite repitituous on some details of AS2. For example, when you put a data type in a var that was set to a different data type "It will throw an error!!"... yes I got that after the first 10 mentionings of it ;) But! funnily enough, it's this repitition that really got the basics into my head that went on to be the building blocks to things that I really had no idea about. I found the book quite well laid out in that he never really moved on to something that you couldn't build on past chapters or sections to understand. It all has a logic to it that I found was easy to follow, but once again the detail was high enough that I couldn't just swim through it.

Examples! yes, do these too I think. I started off in my usual way of just sitting down on my couch with a drink and reading. No... this doesn't work. Sit in front of your computer and give it a shot. Type it out, see what happens and what doesn't happen. Change them up, play, have fun, make stuff. The examples are great and plentiful, and really push the basics in to move on to more advanced techniques to create good OOP AS2. One example lead to the next, and the next built onto that and so on. Logical and it really helped me see into the ways that a good developer like Colin thinks and works when creating applications in Flash.

To end it all off, I took my new found knowledge and put it to making a component for Flash MX2004. This component is a video player for progressive flv's and is very very close to reaching production status and should be up on 2 live sites by the end of the month. I truly look forward to that as it really shows that getting the book paid off for us as it was actually put towards "real world" applications. I'd have to say that putting this component together really hammered in the topics covered in the book of AS2, creating classes and components as there were lots of times where I was sitting there saying "WTF?? why isn't this working". Open the book, read up on what is really happening and a light comes on.

I'd like to thank Colin again for the reviewers copy that he sent out even after having trouble with O'Reilly actually getting these out to some reviewers. An excellent book and definitely something I recommend to anybody out there looking to get knowledgable in AS2 and learn a thing or two from an experienced developer.

Posted by Graeme at September 15, 2004 04:20 AM