So ive been working with Actionscript 3.0 now for well over a year now and I thought i’d share some of the tips they may help others in their quest to becoming a Flash guru.
Get a reference
A somewhat unfortunate reality of Actionscript 3.0 is it has a fairly steep learning curve for those people who don’t have any prior programming experience. Even transitioning over from Actionscript 2.0, things in Actionscript 3.0 can be pretty confusing.
We live in a world where we have an endless amount of information at our fingertips yet something must be said for a good old fashioned paperback book. When learning a new language this is the best method in my opinion.
I use Essential ActionScript 3.0 by Colin Moock. This is a very in depth book giving great explanations of the methods and classes that make up AS3. Colin does a great job of explaining some of the lower level workings of the Flash player which helps to better understand why things are the way they are. I read this book cover to cover (not in one sitting) as it’s a great guide and a better reference to pick up when you are stuck.
Another must have resource is Actionscript 3.0 Animation by Keith Peters. This book shows readers how to animate entirely with code.
Ask questions
There will be times when things simply don’t add up. You’ve spent several hours going over and back over your code and you just can’t figure out why you’re getting errors. You need to ask questions. Simple as that.
Forums such at kirupa.com, actionscript.org and gotoandlearnforum.com are a great resource for finding solutions for those gremlins that pop up in your code unexpectedly. If you’re code is throwing errors every which way, chances are someone can tell you what the problem is.
When you do find the solutions it is important you do that little extra to understand why you got the error in the first place. This is the key to avoiding it next time.
Learn from the masters
Subscribing to the blogs of some of the more prominent “Flash enthusiasts” is a great way to stay in know, not to mention staying abreast of the latest news. The Flash Blog, BIT-101 and swfGeek are just a few that I follow but there are plenty more out there worth a look.
Use custom class libraries
Using custom class libraries written by others can help give your Flash project an extra kick and often make your development a lot easier.
One library I use often is Tweener. Tweener is a class package enabling you to animate any number of an object’s properties over time. Tweener has a simple to use syntax and 41 transitions including various springing, easing and bouncing types.
Some others I’ve used are BulkLoader, for loading external assets it batches and Papervision, a popular 3D rendering library.
Don’t fear OOP
Object Oriented Programming can be a strange thing to get your head around when you first encounter it. It’s the cornerstone of the majority of programming languages out there and once you appreciate it’s power you won’t look back.
I remember being a little put off by OOP when I started being bombarded with words like ‘abstraction’ and ‘polymorphism’. But these are nothing more than fancy words for methods which are actually pretty easy concepts to understand when explained correctly.
Great post, and some useful info!
I found “Learning ActionScript 3.0″ to be an awesome book for learning the language. It’s very much in line with this post, in terms of process, not fearing OOP, etc. It introduces syntax in the timeline, introduces OOP in chapter 6, and then presents examples in both forms throughout the rest of the book. It’s also in full color with color code which really helps. Awesome book.
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A big pointer is to learn the good resources from the bad. Know what sites you can trust and what sites to avoid. For example, you can trust anything with Lee Brimelow’s name on it (gotoAndLear.com/theFlashBlog.com) because he knows what he’s talking about.
Websites like Flashkit are full of mostly junk coded by people who don’t really know what they are doing. Avoid that stuff – it won’t help you learn.
Also look into general programming books to learn the theory (syntax will come quickly when you know the theory). Some good books are in the Head First series. Head First OOP and Head First OOA/OOD are good ones to start with. The code is all in Java, but its pretty close to AS3, so you should be able to follow along fairly well.