ActionScript Cookbook

Rating:
Summary: Better than OK
Review: As the editor of the book, I have to take issue with the anonymous, 3-star review of December 23, 2003 entitled "An OK book for programmers"

A single book can't be perfect for every level of reader, but the near-unanimous 5-star reviews tell us we did a pretty good job. Certainly, there are occasional examples that mirror things that can be found in the documentation, because we strove to make the book as complete as possible. But I'd strongly disagree with the reviewer's statement that "A lot of the examples are obvious explanations of the AS documentation." The vast majority of the recipes are neither obvious nor found in the documentation.

Likewise, it is true that how to loop through an array should be known by skilled programmers, but the book also targets Flashers less familiar with ActionScript. Not every recipe is intended for every reader.

Lastly, the reviewer says that "Seemingly usefull [sic] functions, like recursively stopping everything in a MovieClip, are missing." Whereas it is true that the book cannot possibly cover every scenario, Recipe 7.10 describes how to recursively traverse the movie clip hierarchy to access nested clips. Furthermore, Recipe 7.3 discusses how to control playback, including stopping a movie clip. Any skilled programmer, as the reviewer puports to be, could easily combine those two techniques to achieve the desired goal. Had the reviewer written to O'Reilly or the author for technical support, we would have gladly clarified the situation for him (or her).

As a matter of principle, I have never before reviewed a book I've edited, but I felt obligated to point out the inaccuracies in the preceding review. Please forgive me, but I think the book is worth all of 5 stars.

Rating:
Summary: The best!
Review: For a technical cookbook, this book is a pleasure to read and easily qualifies as best in its genre. It is published as Flash MX is being replaced with its 2004 version, but it should be a good reference for a long time, at least until another edition updates it to Flash MX 2004. Its 28 chapters are well organized with clear titles and well defined sections, a big help when one is looking for the right recipe to an every day coding problem. Joey Lott is a teacher of ActionScript, among other subjects, and that experience comes through in his lucid writing and straight forward examples. I will always keep this handy on my desk to refer to when the need arises.

Rating:
Summary: GET IT!!!
Review: Get this book. That's really all that needs to be said. I'm a java guy learning flash, and what works best for me is a collection of practical (and useable in the real world) applications. That's exactly what this book is. And it's not the same thing you read in almost every programming book: 'this is a loop, this is a variable, this is a method...'. Useless stuff you have to wade thru to get to the meat. (...). I'm on MX 2004, and the book is for MX. (...) I can't wait for the next addition!!!

Rating:
Summary: excellent companion
Review: I said "excellent companion" in the title since I think it goes hand in hand with Moock's excellent "definitive guide".

I am a C, Perl programmer, and have started developing programs in ActionScript and since it has its own peculiarities (and not all that well documented) it is useful to see them included in specific examples.

I found the parts on Flash Remoting quite helpful in giving me ideas and practical solutions. I could not in all honesty give it 5 stars since I was not as happy with his extensive reliance on components. I do not find them very convenient if I am developing with ActionScript (in fact even when using Flash I have sometimes found it easier to write a short script for movie clips rather than configuring and adapting ready made components).

Rating:
Summary: clear concept, useful examples, right on the target
Review: I've been playing around with actionscript for one and half year by now, read a lot of books, understood all the concept, but once I want to jump in and actually start write somthing useful, I always got stuck. All I want to say is that this book got both thesis and how it actually going to work, clear explanation and tones of examples.

Rating:
Summary: Perfect Companion for ASDG2
Review: This book is clearly excellent, once you'll use the files from this book, you will never want to code a project in MX without them, so many usefull actionscript in one place, I just finished reading it from cover to cover.
Even though Flash MX 2004 is out now, I still code all my projects in MX, so this book is really a must have; every subject is covered!

Rating:
Summary: ActionScript Cookbook
Review: This book is great teaching tool and time saver. I've been using Macromedia Flash since Flash 3 and this book has the most useful examples that I've seen.

Rating:
Summary: Perfect companion
Review: This book travels almost everywhere with me, along with Colin Moock's ASDG2. Where ASDG2 stops Joey Lott picks up the pieces and assembles them into practical and useful examples that can be directly applied to everyday projects.

The Actionscript Cookbook should be a part of any developers library. Joey Lott's books consistently impress me as I've also found the Complete Flash Remoting to be invaluable to have around.

Rating:
Summary: An OK book for programmers
Review: This is from a designer-type.

Going from print to the web, Flash5 was easy for me to pick up. After a break of doing no Flash and coming back to it with Flash6 out for a few months, I was frustrated, uptight and bought every Flash6 book I could find by trusted authors in order to catch up, while at the same time trying to get a big flash site done for a client.

Nothing helped. I kept getting more and more frustrated. Everytime I saw the words "call-backs", "this", "method" or "object", I would get knots in my stomach.

Joey Lott not only helped me get the website done, but his Actionscript Cookbook finally got me to understand Flash6 concepts. Flash5-free at last, no more knots in my stomach. I can now read and understand all the other books I bought! Now that Flash7 is out, I'll be buying every title that comes out by Joey Lott. He is the consummate teacher, and includes explains what you need to know, and why you need to know it, in concise, easy-to-understand verbiage.

In my opinion, Joey's Actionscript Cookbook and Colin Moock's Actionscript, the Definitive Guide, and are the best values out there for Flash6.

Rating:
Summary: This cookbook has sweet Action Script recipies
Review: This is how more how-to books should be written. Action Script is the real power behind putting zoom and power into Flash projects, but with its full feature set it can be intimidating to learn how to use properly and many books fail in really explaining the why and how or fail to give any practical real world examples and quickly go off the deep end on wordy explinations of the syntax leaving you hanging, wanting some practical how do I USE what I just read.

This book is different! Its loaded with PRACTICAL, useful well commented examples of USING the code explained with hundreds of code snipets that you can use immidiately as-is or with little modification.

Starts with simpler things like lucid explainations of common pitfalls of checking equality and comparing values to if else expressions, while loops, more complex conditional testing then moves into areas most newbies want to learn how to do, but don't really have any practical examples like how to change a movie's transparency, drawing tricks, masking, etc.. Then it moves into examples of arrays, targeting, making objects dragable, swapping levels, interaction with buttons, validating forms and so on.

The book is well written and while there is plenty of technical information it never gets bogged down under the weight of excessive theory, minutia on details you'll rarely use and quickly forget anyway. Its much more of a friendly 'how do I do this' kind of approach that probably will make you reach for it again and again as a quick reference to solve common problems.

The last 200 pages or so give details of several more meaty projects. Unlike several books that 'explain' Action Script but all too often leave you hanging on how to actual use it, here you see how to use it in real world conditions which will save you hours of frustrating trial and error.