The best way to learn ActionScript in MX

This book has taken my way of visualizing, planning and executing Flash projects into a whole new level. It made look everything so easy and simple, giving me all the answers that I couldn't find in other tutorial books. It goes very detail in every aspect of ActionScript, making it easy to read and to follow up even for me as a European with the basic knowledge of English. Whether you're a beginner or advanced in Flash, you will always find something new, or something you have been doing wrong, wondering why they didn't work. After reading this book, Expert Mode in ActionScript will be more convenient for you to work in, as it is already for me.

Rating

(5/5).

On the first day, the authors said, "let there be a book dedicated to Flash MX Actionscript!" And so the idea of writing this book was conceived.

On the second day, the authors decided, "let us not proof-read this book properly and just publish 1224 pages of intense material!" And so this book was plagued with typos.

On the third day, I began my loooonnngg journey through the text-filled pages of Macromedia Flash MX Actionscript Bible and I was amazed. Amazed at what you ask? Amazed at the how in-depth everything was in this book. Absolutely astonishing. I learnt about commands I never knew existed (and trust me, I've done my fair share of actionscript learning and reading) and especially loved how they had tones of worked example code for you to see and learn how each function, method, property, etc. worked and executed. Just that alone deserves a 5 out of 5, but...

On the fourth day, I came across a typo. Then another one, and another, and yet again another only to realize that this book had more typos that I would make if I typed with my toes. Ok, I'm exaggerating! But it's no fun if you have to figure out for yourself if "setNextTextFormat()" is correct or "setNewTextFormat()" is correct (check out page. 407 in the middle). One typo after another really got me frustrated as I slowly got my own concepts confused! This is surely not what you would expect from a book that says "100% Comprehensive, Authoritative, What You Need" on its cover. I really don't need all those typos thank you very much. As much as it's understandable that these guys must have been under a lot of stress and pressure to quickly produce all the information for this book, it's the typos that are going to pull its score down. So up to now, it's got a 4 out of 5.

On the fifth day, I found out that one of the exercises didn't have a completed version on their CD. After being so used to having completed versions of the exercises to compare my work to (especially when I can't even do it myself and I need to compare code), I was torn apart when I realized Chapter 29 was missing a completed version of one of their exercises from their CD, especially when I kept on typing exactly the same code as that found in the book itself and still seemed to have a problem. But other than that chapter, everything else seemed to be fine on the CD and might I add, I frequently refer to the code found in the exercises of each chapter and use them to guide me with my own code creation. I'll deduct 0.5 there, so its 3.5 out of 5 right now.

On the sixth day, I got to the end of the book and I gave a good sigh of relief as I realized I'd finally gone though like a thousand pages (excluding those 4 chapters), and I realized I couldn't remember a lot of the stuff I had read and that's when I came to the index section. I randomly picked a topic I wasn't too clear about and I got the page I needed to refer to and voila, I was blessed with explanations (with typos though :P). That gives it an extra 0.5, and the total is 4 out of 5!

On the seventh day, I decided it was time for me to whip out a review on this book. And so here you go and this concludes the review. I'd just like to say that this book is worth it if you've got a good foundation of actionscript in your head or at least have previous programming experience, but you're eager to make it solid gold with full coverage of the topic as long as you're ready to do your own typo-detecting and typo-solving. Oh and before you complain like me, be sure to check out the book's related forums because they speak of many of the errors found in the book.

Rating

(4/5).