To create Flash applications that sizzle, you have to learn the code. In this comprehensive guide to the latest version of ActionScript, the object-oriented scripting language for Macromedia Flash, you’ll get the detailed instruction and step-by-step tutorials you need to write robust code and create sophisticated interactive animations. Work with objects and components, interoperate with JavaScript, create games, and more - it’s all here in this informative book for developers, programmers, and designers. Inside, you’ll find complete coverage of Flash 8 ActionScript Master the basics of ActionScript expressions, functions, and variables Work with numbers, arrays, and strings Transform your movie clips with colors and filters Program sound and manage video Manage data with Web Services and Flash Remoting Call ActionScript functions from JavaScript Learn scripting for the Flash stand-alone playe Bonus Companion Web site! Find code downloads and example files at: www.wiley.com/go/actionscriptbible

To create Flash applications that sizzle, you have to learn the code. In this comprehensive guide to the latest version of ActionScript, the object-oriented scripting language for Macromedia Flash, you’ll get the detailed instruction and step-by-step tutorials you need to write robust code and create sophisticated interactive animations. Work with objects and components, interoperate with JavaScript(r), create games, and more - it’s all here in this informative book for developers, programmers, and designers. Inside, you’ll find complete coverage of Flash 8 ActionScript Master the basics of ActionScript expressions, functions, and variables Work with numbers, arrays, and strings Transform your movie clips with colors and filters Program sound and manage video Manage data with Web Services and Flash Remoting Call ActionScript functions from JavaScript Learn scripting for the Flash stand-alone player Bonus Companion Web site! Find code downloads and example files at: www.wiley.com/go/actionscriptbible

• Packed with hands-on instructions and step-by-step tutorials, this book provides soup-to-nuts coverage of ActionScriptand#150;and helps developers create richly interactive animations, Web sites, and movies
• Topics covered include working with objects, using and building components, interoperating with JavaScript, developing for handheld devices, connecting to data sources, remoting, and creating games
• Thoroughly updated to cover the latest features and enhancements in Flash

Practical, Powerful and Complete Book
This is a very easy-reading book (Not that easy-reading, of course, as everybody would expect from a computer language book, but you know what I mean). It is not dull to remember you that you should be familiar with the Flash 8 environment before buying this book.
The first part of the book, the Getting Started, has many useful details. Maybe there are more details than the needed at the beginnig. But, when you are starting to miss the practical issues, the book gives you simple exercises that became more complex in a nice way. And you realize that the details were just there because the authors don’t want to save words on good explanations and examples.
In the second part, "Using Core Classes", the authors start to complement the contents of the different chapters, what means that they did a lot of work of re-writing and polishing prior to publishing. Also, after each exercise, there is a description telling you why you wrote that specific code. This is an achievement not always found in other books of this kind.
Not all the contents were crystal clear for me and there are more errata than I’d like, but they are not big problems actually.
The book is organized very well, from easy to hard, always remembering the previous issues. I have reached part three: "Working with Display Objects". I am enthusiastic.
In short, it is a great book, very powerful and useful if your aim is to learn ActionScript 2.0. I am enjoying each page, and it is very hard for me not to keep on reading and practicing with this nice guide. BUY IT

Excellent Book
Recently I had to do a project for work involving ActionScript 2.0.
I have a technical background and am quite knowledgeable in a multitude of programming languages and programming paradigms. This book got me to where I needed to be fast. I cannot say enough good things about it and the author. Well done!

It’s certainly a learning experience/challenge
I’ve just opened the book for the first time to try to get a handle on XML and ActionScript by coding the examples on page 698. The comments attached to the code don’t tell the real story of what is actually returned from the XML object/variables (my own trace commands displaying what each variable contained were more accurate) and there are a number of coding errors that I had to work out myself. It taught me something, sure, but I shouldn’t have to be correcting the code along the way. It wasted time I didn’t have.

Excelent resource
The book covers all of the bases. buttons, interactivity, sound and websites, more importantly, it is easy to comprehend and get the gist of actionscript 2 which will make it easier to pick up actionscript 3.

Good for begginers
If you don’t know anything of Action, I recommend this book. Who knows a little bit, half of the book is great for you. That’s it.

Great resource for the intended audience
Do not attempt to be able to learn from this book without first knowing how to create Flash documents. Of course, you should also know how to program (logic can’t be taught) and JavaScript seems to be very similar to ActionScript (although knowing any object-oriented language and event-driven programming will suffice).

This book does what it sets out to do, which is to get you familiarized with ActionScript. Its explanation on creating empty movies and ordering of layers (which during the runtime don’t actually exist) was not as good as other references but overall, an excellent reference book.

*Snore*
What a horrible introduction to such a great programming language. I lost all motivation to learn anything about ActionScript after trying to stay awake for a couple of hours. Not good for those using Flash for artistic purposes. Maybe good for programmers who just need a reference. I’ve had good teachers, and bad teachers. This one puts you in a coma due to a lack any type of human emotion or social skills. If you have spent your life in front of a computer, not communicating with anyone other than your 10th level paladin/wizard and his cohort of wood nymphs, this book is for you!

Perfect
If you are familiar with flash and/or programming at all then this book is for you. Together with the online Flash documentation from Adobe’s website, I can find out how to do anything I want to. The book gives great examples of everything that it discusses. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to make killer Flash content.

It’s true that it requires a little bit of programming background to understand what this book is saying sometimes but let me emphasize that it takes minimal experience.

Good if you know what your doing
If your looking for answers on action script and how to easily implement it to flash this is not the book for you. This book gives a good explanation of coding and goes through all forms and ways of coding. I have only made it partially through the book but until i get much further i feel i will just stay confused.

Geek squad alert
Not a book to use if you are casually familiar with Action Scripting, or have only used Action Script in 5 or MX. Almost all examples are functions or object oriented programming, without a layman’s definition of what either is. Good reference if you know of a human being or online chat that can explain things to you. Once I become more expert at scripting, this will probably be a good reference book, but by that time we’ll have Flash 9 or 10, and all will be moot.

Good reference/learning tool if you lock yourself away in a remote cabin and eat sleep and breath Flash for 4 days.

Great reference for people learning ActionScript
This book is a good reference for people learning ActionScript. It covers many advanced topics, and covers them well. As with most books, you will still have to apply yourself to take the concepts taught in this book and make them work in your project.

I have been a very strong Flash ActionScript programmer for many years. I have taught myself how to program by reading the ActionScript dictionary and other Flash manuals. What this means is that I know most of what Flash can do, but I have to apply myself to know how to combine that knowledge to create the result I want with my applications. Fortunately, I have a great aptitude for this.

Because of this background, I don’t typically find many books covering topics I don’t already know. Going into this review, I wrote down the expectations I had for this book.

1) teach me how to create and use Classes (a new concept for me)
2) be a language reference that I can use while developing projects

Classes are covered very early, which is refreshing. Since ActionScript is build around so many Classes, it’s a good idea to cover creating your own Classes. The book covers creating Classes step-by-step, and walks through adding one feature at a time which makes it very easy to follow.

This book doesn’t fulfill by second expectation however. I was expecting that this book would have every ActionScript command documented and give an explanation which would be more digestible than the ActionScript dictionary’s. This book doesn’t provide that, which isn’t a bad thing; it just doesn’t align with my expectations.

The book classifies the reader level at Beginning to Advanced... I don’t agree with this. I would definitely recommend this book to someone who is already familiar with Flash, and wants to know more about ActionScript.

Finally - a book with meat!
If you’re a hard-core developer with a background in "real" OOP (not "Object-Oriented-Like" scripting tools such as ActionScript, but rather languages such as C++, C# etc.), then this book is for you. Previously, I bought 3 other books on ActionScript (including "Training From The Source") trying to find one that didn’t take the pansy "click here, drag that, type this" approach - I wanted a book that told me "WHY" I should do something and show me the code to do it - no pictures, please, just code. Without knowing why you’re doing something, you have just relegated yourself to doing only what others have done before you - you will never go beyond that. This book gives you background on why things are the way they are, when it might change, and what to do in the meantime, and the pros and cons of each choice.

The only weakness I see is that it covers a lot of detail about progamming basics that take up pages needlessly for the more advanced developer. But you can always just skip those sections - those topics make the book more appealing to newbies. I myself did learn a lot about RegEx that I never knew before.

I’m sure this book has other shortcomings somewhere, but I can’t see it yet because I’m too tickled to find one that talks directly to folks who don’t hold that funky "timeline" thing as the Holy Grail.

people have to work...
Well, I know that when looking a code answer for a specific problem, we may be lazy and frustrated and want that any book we have show us the right way and right now... I believe that such book doesn’t exists. But I believe that this book is one of the best for all your actionscript needs. However, the novice and intermediate programmer have to study harder that expert ;)

An Absolute Necessity (spelling?) if you need to learn ActionScript
This is the book that really put me over the top in learning ActsionScript. I still use it today as a reference. The examples are excellent and easy to follow. They don’t get too deep too fast and by the end, you have a great handle on the language.

I will agree with the reviewer who said you should have some knowledge of programming to being with. However, having said that, I only had a little knowledge of C++ via Jesse Liberty’s books. So I was no programmer.

I’m still no expert, but I’ve come a long way since reading this book.

This book is well worth the price.

An incredible reference, but NOT for beginners.
If you have the basics of actionscript down, this book is great. I use it at least once a week for quick reference and code examples. They leave enough margin on the sides of the pages to include your own notes, and the INDEX is awesome.

If you are interested in learning actionscript or are a flash person who mainly creates timeline-based SWFs, DO NOT buy this book. My suggestion would be to head over to kirupa.com and learn from the tutorials. Once you’ve got the hang of it then pick up this book. It fills in a lot of gaps and answers a lot of questions.

+-
The Book:

It’s a bad example for the title it presents.
Actually, is not a full Bible. If you think you’re buying this book thinking you get a reference bible for any kind of code problem, you’re wrong. You have to read it all. Yep, from the start. This, if you want to know what’s beeing talked about in chapters ahead.

To a medium Flash user, it’s another good, not excellent, book.


To Amazon team:
And by the way, I found no complaint zone in the help links of amazon, so I have to say I’m disappointed with them, because my book, althought fully legible, came with a huge encadernation error.

Godd breadth of Actions Script Knowledge
I found all the answers I was looking for, plus lots of resources....

ActionScript Bible
The book is VERY technical, and puts good use to people who are familiar with technical literature. However, it’s examples are poor, so don’t expect this book to give you a step-by-step course.

Disappointed
I generally believe the Wiley Computer Bible series is outstanding. The in-depth coverage of the various programs, excellent examples, and broad scope of information is tremendous. This book, however, is proving to be very disappointing. The coverage of topics is incomplete and many subjects are not even discussed. A significant omission is the data-related component category, which given the sparse documentation elsewhere, was a primary reason I purchased this book. I find myself reading the free Adobe Flash 8 PDF files instead of this book. Granted, I don’t expect this book to rehash what’s already available at Adobe’s web site or in the help files, but I do expect a Wiley Bible book to provide a clear and thorough explanation of topics which augment and expand upon the program’s free documentation, giving me valuable insight and examples. All in all, this book is proving to be a better door stop than a comprehensive and useful reference book.

Not what I expected
This book is not a learning tool. It is a reference tool for people who have 99.9% of actionscript memorized and need to know if there is a ";" or a ":" on line 912 of their script. If you’re a beginner with actionscript you’ll be wondering "why do I need to know this?" throughout the first chapters. Lots of script but no real world examples of why you would need it. I’m 3 chapters in and I haven’t learned anything practical that I can use to enhance the animations I’ve already created. I have no idea why they would start the book with cryptic mathematical functions and not start with something basic like play options.

Maybe this is a good referece book (hence the 4 star rating), but for my needs; I’m afraid this book is not going to be helpful.

Thanks again Wiley.

It’s all you’ll ever need.
It really lives up to its name. This book is definitely the bible of Actionscript. It is all you’ll ever need for learning Actionscript, and referencing.

The best Flash ActionScript resource available.
I’ve owned all the Flash Bibles by Reinhardt & Lott, since Flash MX.

I have always found each of the books to be a great resource.

You might have noticed that Flash’s built-in help resource is aweful... the search never finds exactly what you’re looking for.

The index in the Flash 8 Bible is awesome - most of the time you can find exactly what you are looking for.

If you’re new to Flash, there are many great tutorials in this book, as well as a CD full of completed tutorial files and more.

I definetly reccomend the Flash 8 ActionScript Bible over all other Flash ActionScript books.

Outstanding Presentation
The title of this book is actually "Flash 8 ActionScript Bible". For some reason, Amazon has it listed as "Flash "X" ActionScript Bible".

I am new to the world of Flash and ActionScript, though I have considerable experience in other programming/scripting languages. I was especially interested in harnessing the power of ActionScript for interactive Flash applications, and this book did not disappoint.

- Writing is clear and concise.
- Code samples are well thought out, and highly relevant to the learning objectives.
- Excellent instruction on marrying ActionScript to JavaScript, and vice versa.
- Good coverage of XML(reading in from a file, writing out to a server-side page via querystring or inputstream)

This book is top notch, and I will be VERY surprised if any future reviewers assign it fewer than 4 or 5 stars.