Re: FLASH: A book on actionscript.

[Hal Medrano]

>

>Is there a good book on actionscript that will start off with basic concepts

>and progress to advanced goodies?

>


Hey Quintin,


NO!!  And this is one of the main drawbacks to our new little language.  If

you have a background in object-oriented programming, it's easy to figure

out, but if you don't, you're outta luck.


Flash 4 Bible has a short intro and includes some basic programming

concepts behind Actionscript.


Flash 4 Magic is nifty and has a bunch of code you can modify to your own

ends, but it doesn't attempt to teach the fundamentals of Actionscript as a

programming language.


Good resources are to be found on the web:


http://www.flashkit.com

http://www.were-here.com

http://www.moock.org/webdesign/flash/

http://www.FlashBible.com/members/


and if you have specific questions, you can always look them up at:


http://i-technica.com/flashlist/ (Sock Man)

http://www.macromedia.com/support/flash/technotes.html


There's also a brief but useful primer at:


http://i-technica.com/whitestuff/actionscriptref.html


Main concepts to grasp (at first, at any rate) are:


working with variables,

getting and setting movie properties,

using loops,

using conditional statements,

understanding substrings and using the "Eval" statement.


Errors are usually a result of:


misspellings;

string literal vs. expression errors;

path errors (i.e. writing the wrong path to a variable).


Commenting your code and using the Trace function are good habits to get into.


Thanks to Branden Hall for many of these tips.


Good luck!


Hal


Hal Medrano

New Media Group

U S WEST Creative Services


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