Foundation ActionScript Book

Foundation ActionScript is aimed at those who have some experience of Flash, perhaps having produced a few timeline-based Flash movies. Like Flash 5 Magic with ActionScript the concepts and procedures are demonstrated through the development of a "real-life" (in the sense that it includes the kind of content you would expect to find on a real-life professionally produced site Web site), in this case called Stun.com. Sham Bhangal kicks off in the shallow end with a chapter entitled Starting Out and moves on to Timeline Actions and Basic Interactivity. From then on it's competent swimmers only as Navigation Tricks, Variables, Looping and Decision Making and Sound get the Foundation treatment on the way to more advanced chapters covering advanced interactivity and modular programming. Short step-by-step projects--Adding a Label to a Timeline, Stopping and Restarting a Timeline, Running a Timeline Backwards--demonstrate individual techniques which go together to complete a particular site feature. In between the projects there's lots of elaboration and boxed out copy provides hints, tips and asides on related topics. For a book about programming, by an author with an engineering background, it's to Bhangal's credit that he rarely loses sight of the fact that ActionScript is simply a means to a creative end. --Ken McMahonRead More