Very few Flash or Flex development books get me excited. They’re all generally pretty decent, but only the rare ones¹ make me want to read cover to cover. A good programming book is one that I want to share with others before I’m finished reading it. Among those great gems, I’ve recently added Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser. It certainly lives up to its title.

Learning ActionScript 3.0 differs greatly when compared to other books published by O’Reilly. The most obvious difference when you see this one on the shelf will be that there’s no iconic animal drawing on the front cover. When you pick it up, and start looking through its pages, you’ll soon discover an even more surprising difference. Every page in Learning ActionScript 3.0 is printed in full color. All the code is formatted to match Flash CS3’s ActionScript editor. All the screenshots are, you guessed it, fully colorized. Unlike many other developers, we of the Flash community tend to work on projects that are highly visual. Screenshots in previous Flash and Flex books I’ve read have been greyscale and sometimes very difficult to see. Learning ActionScript 3.0 sets a new standard. The books I read in the future will lose points immediately for crappy black and white screenshots.

The visual treatment isn’t all that stands out. The authors have experience teaching “thousands of students at universities, training facilities, and conferences”. In the preface, they explain that they’ve been told time and again that no ActionScript book for beginners is truly all that good for the intended audience. They set out to try to fix that problem. In my opinion, they’ve done an excellent job crafting a book that slowly eases someone into programming ActionScript without being too overwhelming. They wait six chapters before introducing Object-Oriented Programming, and I think it works very well. The first three chapters offer the bare minimum of programming concepts and then the reader is taken into sections about how to use the Display List and the Timeline. Only then, after the reader has built a couple things, and hopefully gained some confidence, do the authors begin to introduce the complete concepts behind objects and classes. It’s a very gentle introduction with enough hands-on learning that it doesn’t get boring.

In later chapters, the authors touch a bit on text, sound, video, animation, drawing, and loading external assets like images and XML. With each topic separated into its own chapter, I get the feeling that this book will be an excellent resource for someone who might want to skip certain bits of functionality and reference it later as needed, or for a beginner that needs a refresher every once in a while. I noticed on several occasions, as I was reading, that these sections cover many of the most common questions I see in online Flash forums.

The book ends with a chapter on “Programming Design and Resources”. This chapter introduces various software development models, such as waterfall, spiral, and several agile methods. I like that this section was included because most Flash books don’t really mention larger project-scale processes that developers might want to consider following. It’s refreshing and forward thinking. After that, the reader gets a very short introduction to design patterns. Though I was impressed that they were included, I felt this section could have been bigger or omitted. With such a slow introduction to OOP earlier in the book, the sudden appearance of what many consider a very advanced topic felt out of place. Still, I think it will probably help inspire some especially-talented new developers to discover how to move to the next level, so perhaps it fits. Finally, the chapter ends with several large lists of online resources for Flash developers, including many popular blogs (sadly, not mine. haha), open source libraries, books, forums, conferences, and more. For someone new to Flash development, this section alone offers hundreds of ways to go beyond what’s in the book.

While targeted more at beginners, Learning ActionScript 3.0 serves as an excellent reference to some of the most common tasks ActionScript developers encounter daily. The transition from the very basics of Flash programming to more advanced topics is gentle, but engaging. The full color pages throughout this book separate it from everything else on the shelf, and O’Reilly couldn’t have chosen a better topic than Flash to enhance with this wonderful addition. I’m not the only person excited about this book either; Lee Brimelow, Platform Evangelist at Adobe, called it “the best ActionScript book ever written.”

¹For reference, the last Flash book that got me excited was Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8, which I read back in 2006 (there’s an updated version, Object Oriented ActionScript 3, if you’re interested).