‘Learning Actionscript 3.0‘ by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser bills itself as ‘A Begginer’s Guide’ to Actionscript 3 for non-traditional programmers. With this in mind, I picked it up a couple of years ago when committing to making the transition from AS2 to AS3.

The book is made up of several sections, each one containing a number of chapters dedicated to exploring the basics of a particular aspect of AS3. The topics covered are wide ranging, from language and syntax to sound and video, external assets, and even touching on OOP – a welcome addition that I wasn’t expecting in such a begginer’s book.Each section is jam-packed with practical applications, code examples, and color pictures to go along with them, making the book very easy to follow and giving you a chance to put your new skills to work and reinforce your knowledge. As is pretty much standard in books of this type, the chapters are also littered with smaller tips, handy notes, and warnings, which can often serve as a jumping off point for further research.

I found the book to be very well written, and thorough in its explanations, but this isn’t really enough to make it the ultimate beginner’s guide. The problem for people who are new to programming and all it’s concepts is that a lot of fundamentals common to most programming languages such as functions and logical operators are touched on, but only briefly. There is enough there that someone with even a little experience will be able to get by, and even total beginners who persevered would probably be able to pick it up, but there are books out there which handle the basics far more elegantly, giving over more pages to foundation knowledge.

Overall, I would recommend this book in a heartbeat to anyone with a basic grasp of programming logic who needs a good overview of the basics of AS3, either simply to add a little interactivity and dynamism to their flash work, or as a springboard to learning the language in more depth, but I would struggle to recommend it to absolute beginners without first recommending that they check out the real basics online, or in another book.

Learning Actionscript 3.0 was written by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser. It is published by O’Reilly with the ISBN-13: 978-0-596-52787-7, and retails at $39.99.