Actionscript: The Definitive Guide

Reader Brian Donovan contributed the review below of O'Reilly & Associates' ActionScript: The Definitive Guide, which he says is a "must have" for anyone working on Web animation with Flash. Offered under the condition that you please not make your site utterly dependent on Flash, of course;)

ActionScript : The Definitive Guide
author	Colin Moock
pages	672
publisher	O'Reilly & Associates
rating	9
reviewer	Brian Donovan
ISBN	1565928520
summary	Complete and authoritative. Check the author's site book site (http://www.moock.org/asdg) for sample chapters and code.

What it is, why you'd want it

Actionscript, the programming language that's been supported in the Flash player and authoring environment since Flash version 4, is exhaustively described in a new title in the Definitive Guide series from O'Reilly. Written by widely-recognized web developer Colin Moock (http://www.moock.org) and edited by Bruce Epstein (author of Director in a Nutshell and Lingo in a Nutshell), the book lives up to the hype.

Moock divided Actionscript: the Definitive Guide (A: tDG) into 3 sections. "Actionscript Fundamentals" covers the language itself (variables, the Actionscript datatypes, how to declare and use functions, etc) in a way that's accessible to newbies without boring everyone else. "Applied Actionscript" is shorter and has a more conversational tone, explaining how to externalize your code, the ins-and-outs of making smart clips, using text fields as form fields in your movies, and debugging. The "Language Reference" is basically the Actionscript Dictionary from the Flash 5 Actionscript Reference Guide (ARG, pronounced "arrgghhh," similar to the noise that one inevitably makes when forced to refer to same) on steroids. In fact, it would almost be worth the full price of the complete book all by itself. Code is sprinkled liberally throughout. Included are four appendices (resource urls, a keycodes reference, Flash 4/Flash 5 backwards compatibility advice, and a table listing the differences between Actionscript and Javascript/ECMA-262).

What I liked

Although some constructs present in both Javascript and Actionscript (like the arguments object) that managed to go completely unmentioned in the ARG are discussed, the "Actionscript Fundamentals" section is not a retread of the basics of the ECMA standard. There's a whole chapter on events and event-handling in Flash, including a comprehensive treatment of movie clip events. The chapter on OOP in Actionscript is the first real discussion of object-oriented Actionscript programming that I've seen outside of a few posts to a Flash programming mailing list. The detailed coverage of the stacking order of movies and movie clip instances is priceless -- Figure 13-4, "The complete Flash Player movie clip stack" is the clearest visual representation of movie and movie clip instance stacking available.

In the "Applied Actionscript" part of A: tDG, I got the most mileage from the discussion of the different methods of pulling code out of movies and making it more reusable (import from file, #include, shared libraries, and smart clips). Most of that material was already available in separate tech notes at the Macromedia web site (and, to a lesser extent, in the ARG), but it's great to see it brought together in book form.

When I got to the "Actionscript Language Reference," I did a quick page count. It weighed in at 50 pages lighter than the "Actionscript Dictionary" in the ARG, but manages to be more complete and more useful. This could be due to the fact that the pages in A: tDG are covered with text while the "Actionscript Dictionary" pages sport oversized inner margins and whitespace galore. Code is plentiful here, since the entry for practically every Actionscript object or class includes an example script fragment that is generally longer and more useful than the corresponding snippet (when one even exists) in the ARG. Where it's warranted, bug information is included, identifying specific problems with the implementation of the specific Actionscript element in the Flash 5 Player (pinpointing differences in behavior between builds when differences exist) and suggesting workarounds where possible -- the sort of feature that saves coders mountains of frustration of the "it's 4am and I'm tired?why isn't this working?!" variety.

The bottom line

I would have liked to have seen more space devoted to optimization/performance (somehow, code optimization got lumped in with file size considerations in the "The Bandwidth Profiler" section in Chapter 9: "Debugging"), but if it sounds as though I'm nitpicking here, it's because I am. For anyone working with Flash who is interested in taking off the training wheels and developing in "expert mode," this book is a must-have."

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You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.