A chapter on methods for constructing creative/unusual site navigation/interfaces would be very helpful.
The traditional leftnav/topnav paradigms often used in HTML/CSS layouts are usually eschewed by Flash designers as being too staid.
This would also be a good place to introduce methods for implementing a “liquid GUI”.

A chapter devoted to performance optimization.

The chapter that explains design patterns is not comprehensive enough to be truly useful to a beginner.
(I seriously doubt this chapter receives much attention from your readers)
I would post this content entirely on the companion site, and provide a reference to it at the end of the book.

My last observation is probably the highest on my personal priority list:
Reference books are often more useful if they are “spiral/coil-bound”, so they open fully and stay that way while the reader’s hands are busy typing.

Thanks,
Byron

I am a programing teacher in Brazil. Usually my classes are filled with designers that never writed a line of code.

I am using your book for the first time as a material on a 128 hour course named Advanced Flash. My mission in this course is to help students become prepared to create they on projects on Flash. This means banners, games and of course web sites.
So this course superpass AS3.

That said, we are still in the beggening of the course, and so far, the book has been a very good resource. It’s the best book for AS3 begginers with no doubt.
It’s a shame we didn’t have a portuguese version yet.

After playing with that and skimming over the classes, I already feel like I’ve learned more, or at least have some ideas for experimentation.

Or, if games aren’t your cup of tea, another project that would be fun would be an photo gallery like imagevue.

It would be great to start the project at a concept level. Lay it all out before a single line of code is typed. What do we want our game to do? How can we break what we want to do into different classes, and what does the class structure look like? Which classes will handle what, how do they communicate/work with each other? Where do we begin? You could even go so far as to show multiple ways to do things, and the pros and cons of doing them each way.

Most AS3 examples and tutorials out there that I’ve found are single classes or are in the timeline (yuck). It’s difficult to learn how to take something like that and be able to transfer it into something large scale that has many different class files.

Chapters could focus not so much on introducing concepts, but rather on adding new functionality to our project. I think that would help to make the book more appealing. Just imagine looking at the index… The first couple chapters, setting up the game window, UI elements, creating our hero, adding player controls, adding enemies, AI, win/loss conditions… you get the point. Each of those functionality goals could very well end up introducing a new concept anyways. Chapter titles like that would get me a lot more excited than something generic like “Arrays” or “Event handling,” even though they could very well be covering the same material.

I have no previous programming experience with AS or OOP, in fact I taught myself HTML and CSS and that’s it.

I bought Moock’s Essential AS3 as a companion to this book and will move on to it after finishing this one.

I briefly looked at some of the early chapters in Essential AS3 and quickly put it down. It is not for the beginner!!

Your quiz section on this site has been reassuring as I scored 100% for each of the sections I have covered which helps to show that learning has taken place, even if it doesn’t feel like it!

Whilst some of the concepts do take careful thought in order to understand the logic, the writing style (use of analogies) and structure has made it an excellent teaching aid.

I hope to get to grip with the syntax as I progress but feel sure that many answers not provided (or comprehended) in the text explanation due to page limits, will be provided with this online accompaniment.

Shame I live in the UK and am unable to attend your training sessions.

Thanks for the resource.

I certainly understand the desire to follow through a few projects from start to finish, and we’re contemplating a companion book that will do just that. The idea is, LAS3 will serve as the basis in fundamentals, and the companion book will not need to reiterate some of that material. (We’ll need to assume some readers may not have LAS3, but we don’t have to repeat the whole book.)

We’re working through schedule and project issues at the moment, so we’re not sure when, or even if, it will happen, but it’s on our bucket list. Heh.

Then I went to reading your book and suddenly everything fell into its own place. The book is well organized and I like your writing style - very light, understandable for a novice like me, explaining the essential details. Those interested in all the little details, could simply go to a more comprehensive reference guide by Colin Moock.

In my opinion, these books give an exception opportunity to learn AS3. There are very few good books on the subject on the market nowdays. Its a great learning source.

I totally agree with you, Rich, about basing a book on programming principles rather than trying to create some project. It really doesn’t give you much rather than an experience of building a single project after completing the book. What I wanted from the book is to learn how to build different projects not limiting to one single type. And your book have helped me tremendously in that.

Thank you for creating this book to help all starting Flash developers!

This is what i found in Gaia and now, in pure mvc… Some metaphorical umbrella, to deliver full projects..
I ll conclude by saying that there is not definitive guide to actionscript.
While Moock tought me the syntax, you provided the everyday examples, in a useful, compact and diverse approach, and other sources helped me to wire it all together….I feel that one needs to get through all of them to grasp the sheer number of information which Actionscript and programming holds.