Actionscript Cookbook [ペーパーバック]

The Actionscript Cookbook is an extremely useful resource for aspiring and veteran designers. I've been designing/developing since Flash 4 and I still found this book very insightful and full of great hints and explanations.

A decent book for beginners but better for intermediate to advanced developers and designers. I'd recommend Colin Mook's Actionscript for Flash MX (also by O'Reily) which explores more fundamental concepts in Actionscripting 1 which are still pertinent in many cases to AS2.

I appreciated the code examples, although admittedly I think I did remember finding a few errors, however the errors were on the nitpicking typo level and I usually found after getting annoyed thatI hadn't written the code correctly.

Their example on Storing Persistent Shared Local Objects (flash cookies) was particularly useful.

Well organized and clear (and no, I'm not affliated with O'Reilly, lol)

this is a great book but it will not work with macromedia mx 2004 unless you set the export setting to flash player 6.

I got this notice from the author himself.

mx 2004 cookbook should be comming out in september 2005

~mark

As the editor of the book, please allow me to respond to two inaccurate reviews...

In response to C. A. TBF's review of May 26, 2005 ("Too Many Examples DO NOT WORK"), I'd suggest he contact O'Reilly tech support (booktech (at) oreilly.com). As you can tell from the other reviews, other readers are not having the same problem. The code examples have all been thoroughly reviewed and the few errata are posted on O'Reilly's catalog page for the book. The code examples work. The reviewer must have forgotten to do something basic, like give a name to a movie clip using the Property inspector. If he writes to me or O'Reilly, we'll gladly help him solve any problems.

In other news...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 purports 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.