Foundation ActionScript for Flash 8 / Edition 1

by Kristian Besley, Sham Bhangal, Eric Dolecki, David Powers

Overview

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 version 8 of Flash. 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 you're a non-programmer who wants to learn Flash programming quickly and thoroughly. The authors teach the basics, and provide an all-around proficiency in ActionScript, as well as Flash components within Flash 8. You'll 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, you'll have constructed a cutting-edge Flash site to showcase your newly learned skills.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781590596180
Publisher:	Apress
Publication date:	04/10/2006
Series:	Foundation
Edition description:	1st ed.
Pages:	648
Product dimensions:	7.01(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.36(d)

About the Author

Kristian Besley has worked with multimedia for three years, but has been creative with computers for much longer. He currently develops Flash-based material within an educational environment. This material includes interactive presentations to illustrate how scientific things work, as well as graphical user interfaces and tools allowing web-based content creation with basic computer skills. He was a contributing author on the seminal Flash Math Creativity, and many other friends of ED books. In 2002, he launched the world's first bi-annual HTML markup-based TableArt competition. The competition was an unbelievable success.

Table of Contents

Interactive Flash.- Making Plans.- Movies that Remember.- Movies that Decide for Themselves.- More Power, Less Script.- Movies that Remember How to do Things.- Objects and Classes.- Objects on the Stage.- Reusable Code and Realistic Movement.- Games and Sprites.- Drawing API.- Adding Sound to Flash.- Loading Dynamic Data with XML.- Finishing the Futuremedia Case Study.- Advanced Actionscript: Components and Classes.

Editorial Reviews

From the reviews:

"This book covers the fundamental aspects of ActionScript. … The writing style is very easygoing; numerous examples and illustrations are provided to help readers grasp this programming environment. … the book can be read by anyone wanting to know the building blocks of some of the most successful Web sites. Written in a very reader-friendly manner, and providing many practical tips, this book needs to be on the desk of the aspiring Web programmer. I recommend it for learning an exciting technology." (Radu State, ACM Computing Reviews, Vol. 49 (12), December, 2008)

From the Publisher