[.ca] Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript (ISBN 0735711836)

Where's The Beef? (or, more correctly, "Where's The OOP?"):
Why does a book entitled "Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript" only include 3 chapters (plus one "real-world" example chapter) on OOP? With 16 chapters and 400 pages, this is all the OOP we get? I guess the New Riders marketing folks decided the Flash book market needed a book with OOP in its title (whether they had enough OOP material to fill a book or not). To make matters worse, the OOP chapters in this book assume you are already intimately familier with OOP and just need an overview of how it works (or doesn't work) in AS. This is certainly not a book for Actionscripters who want to learn OOP! The authors are clearly experts in their field but alas, an expert does not always a writer make! I often found Mr. Hall's writing to be obtuse and overly verbose. Some of his "explanations" had me more confused than when I started! Now with that all said you may think I hated the book but actually I found quite a few useful nuggets... - chapter 1 has some very good advice on optimizing your setup of the Flash environment - chapters 6-10 provide useful information on components -- both their useage and creation - chapter 11 provides some nice debugging tips - the remaining chapters provide a variety of useful techniques for the AS programmer Bottom line, I bought a used copy of the book and felt it was worth the price; had I paid a higher price I would not have been happy with it.

The book for OO Actionscript:
By far the best book/resource/must have on OO in ActionScript. This books is still based on the 1.0 standard, I am hoping they will write a 2.0 version as well. I bought it based on the reviews and have to say it was hands down the best book on software I have bought in years. This is a must have.

Now for programmers!:
I have always felt that Flash was a designer-only tool, inaccessible to the likes of programmers. This book tries to change all that by making Flash development accessible to programmers. I believe the book is also designed for designers who want to understand OOP in ActionScript. After a brief introduction to OOP (which is all done through UML) and ActionScript syntax, the reader is presented with constructing an application from start to finish. I was particularly pleased that this example uses the famous MVC (Model-View-Controller) pattern, familiar to many OOP programmers. After completing this chapter, the reader will have a good understanding of the basics of OOP in ActionScript. The next section of the book discusses many of the tiny details in the previous chapter in much more depth. There is discussion on using pre-built Flash components in your application as well as building your own components. Each of these topics are covered in sufficient depth to satisfy the reader. The final section of the book seems to be "everything else you need to know about Flash and ActionScript". This section includes a discussion on debugging your application, useful tips and tricks, and even an introduction to Flash remoting.

My Favorite ActionScript Book:
I've been a C++/Java programmer for 6 years and I have to say, this book is wonderful. I've never before heard such a clear disposition on what a prototype based language is before and that's so critical in understanding how to do good OOP in Flash. This book is great. Right before I bought it, I puposed to write a dynamic image slide component, and loh and behold, that's the example they use to describe component development in flash. You've got to love it when that happens!

Fantastic book for OOP concepts in ActionScript.:
I've worked with Flash for many years. I've also been programming in Pascal, C, C++ for many years. This book helped me for the first time tie the OOP concept to Flash movie clips, frames, sound objects, and timelines. I didn't need a book with pages of code examples. I just needed to have a good explaination and short examples of how the components work or how to manipulate the XML object. In a way, this book serves as a refresh course for people who are familiar with tools such as Visual Basic and have always thought Flash is just for animations. This book is for Flash 6, the concept is still the same with Flash 7 and ActionScript 2.0