The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference
Guide: For Developers and Designers
Using Flash CS4 Professional (Adobe
Developer Library) by Darren
Richardson
Readable, Fun, Good Code, A Must-Have
No matter what your background, the pages that follow will provide you
with some excellent knowledge, insight, and even a little bit of wisdom in
the realm of Flash and ActionScript. Happy learning! -- Branden Hall, from
the Foreword
Written by Flash insiders with extensive knowledge of the technology, this
guide is designed specifically to help Flash designers and developers
make the leap from ActionScript 2.0 to the new object-oriented
ActionScript 3.0 quickly and painlessly. Formatted so you can find any
topic easily, ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide explains: Object-
oriented programming (OOP) concepts, such as packages and classes

ActionScript 3.0 features and player enhancements that improve
performance Workflow differences between ActionScript 2.0 and
ActionScript 3.0 including tools, code editing, component sets, and image
and font rendering Where did it go? A guide to help you find familiar
features in ActionScript 3.0, such as global functions, operators,
properties, and statements How do I? Step-by-step solutions for
performing tasks with ActionScript 3.0, including input, sound, video,
display, events, text, and more Also included are overviews of Flash and
ActionScript features and workflows. ActionScript 3.0 is a huge upgrade to
Flashs programming language -- and this guide helps you upgrade your
skills to match it.
Personal Review: The ActionScript 3.0 Quick Reference Guide:
For Developers and Designers Using Flash CS4 Professional
(Adobe Developer Library) by Darren Richardson
I was browsing at Borders at Park Ave and 57th, where they had exactly
one copy of this. I'd heard of this book but hadn't seen it yet--it was
announced over the summer but O'Reilly kept delaying publication so the
book could be current with Flash CS4. I looked up a few items in the ToC
and index, and went straight to the checkout queue. I had to have this
book right away! even if Amazon could sell it to me cheaper!
Okay, why is the book good? I've spent more time with it now. I'll give you
my three biggest reasons:
1) It's readable. It really is. It's friendly and accessible. Did you ever enjoy
those juvenile histories and biographies and How-and-Why science books
that started out with something like, "Hi! This is a fun book, and we're
going to take you on a fun journey, step-by-step. This is a great subject to
be interested in! Aren't you happy? Well, we are!!!"?
Well, did you like books like that? I did, and I've always resented scholarly
and technical books that didn't introduce themselves along those lines. So
many of them are written like resentful documentation: "Go away. We hate
you. This is only for ugly, squirrelly, socially backward people like US."
This book is overtly addressed to users of ActionScript 1.0 and 2.0, and
those already using 3.0; to artists, designers, and developers of all stripes.
It's all-inclusive. Like Rich Shupe's Learning ActionScript 3.0, it has a
friendly, hand-holding attitude that goes through the length of the book.
2) A personal obsession: this book has a good section on how to write
XML loaders that use HTML. This is a very poorly documented area of
Flash. The ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook had a little bit on it, but the
explanation was hard to follow and the code was buggy.
3) Another personal interest: SWF loaders and unloaders. This is the first
book I've seen that tells you how to unload both the thing loaded and the

"event listener" that keeps sitting there, using up processor time and
space.
The book is also current with the less traditional Flash-related
technologies, such as FlashDevelop and Flex.
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