Rating: 
Summary: A needle in the haystack?
Review: This book is a gem. For new-to-programming or experienced programmer alike, this book will be undeniably useful.Colin teaches you how to program in Actionscript. Infact, little in this book can be simply copy and pasted into your project... That's the beauty! Unique flash solutions as with anything, created by fresh, intelegent minds with an appreciation of the tools they have to work with. Colin teaches you the subtle aspects of Macromedia Flash and it's powerful scripting language. He uses generic programming terminology and introduces and explains them for the new programmer. This is very, very important for new programmers who wish to move themselves at some point across to another language. Since leanrning Actionscript with Colin (Beginning of 2003) I have moved into learning PHP/MySQL. And thanks to Colin I can happily browse through the functions list or the language reference and have a pretty good idea what I'm reading. Not for the unthinking-quickdraw type, this book is for thinkers and I give it 110% for optimising the time you spend reading/studying it vs. the results you get. As for myself, productivity on generic flash websites has doubled, and the quality of the websites has also. Actionscript is developing with each release of Flash and will turn from being a designers-only tool to a programmers-who-can-design tool. So all you designers out there - get studying!
Rating: 
Summary: Warning - NOT FOR BEGINNERS
Review: This book is a very good resource for actionscripting. However, this book is not for beginners. The first few pages of the first chapter talks about keyframes, movieclips, trace command, and other things without fully explaining it. I highly recommend another book for absolute beginners, but I also highly recommend this book to intermediate and advanced users.
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Summary: An obvious purchase
Review: This book is primarily an obvious purchase because of the extremely cretinous policy driving Macromedia's manual publications. Much of what is in this book belongs in Macromedia documentation. Like all reference texts (really dictonaries for language learners) this book is not for beginners. Unless you have some experience with program design, you are unlikely to learn how to assemble even a reasonable suite of code from the text. That's not a criticsm of the text - it just isn't written for that market. Almost every language construct gets a piece of exemplar code to illustrate calls and side effects. Even the OO side of things, such as it is in Actionscript, gets played out. This is a fine book and the sheer labour involved in fiddling with every function is a credit to the author's resilience. If you are actually programming in Actionscript rather than merely mooning over the nice Flash UI, then this book will be very useful.
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Summary: DEFINITIVE IN EVERY SENSE
Review: This edition of "ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide" is truly definitive. Its language reference alone has almost doubled, when compared to what featured in the previous edition. A lot of new methods, classes, objects, and properties have been added. Also, there are hundreds of new code examples which simplified the latest techniques of Flash MX: thus making tasks like: how to create reusable components, draw circles, save data to disk, preload variables and convert arrays to onscreen tables, more understandable.
This book is really superb. Its beauty is that it analyzed every aspect of Flash MX tools, including all the undocumented and misdocumented features.
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Summary: Definitive Guide = Definitive Title
Review: We are using Flash as the UI on an "avionics-grade" project. When I came on the project I knew I would be using every aspect of ActionScript - from simple 'ifs' and 'loops' to the low-down dirty details of the XMLSocket object - and I would need an "avionics-grade" reference. I read the reviews and Mr. Moock's book was highly regarded. The book has not disappointed me once - on the contrary, its proved to be the "definitive guide" on more than one very important decision. I have not spent much time in the first half of the book where the basics of Flash are explained, but on occasion I've thumbed up there and found good info. The true productivity-enhancer is the alphabetical class-by-class reference in the second half of the book. Many times a day I come to a decision point in my code, flip to the book's index, find the object I need, scan the object's methods and properties, read more in-depth, discover a previously unknown tidbit of AS knowledge, and return to my code with the feeling that an informed decision is about to be made. If you are going to be doing hard-core ActionScripting I would advise you to buy this book and place it opposite your mouse.
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