Practical, Powerful and Complete Book
This is a very easy-reading book (Not that easy-reading, of course, as everybody would expect from a computer language book, but you know what I mean). It is not dull to remember you that you should be familiar with the Flash 8 environment before buying this book.
The first part of the book, the Getting Started, has many useful details. Maybe there are more details than the needed at the beginnig. But, when you are starting to miss the practical issues, the book gives you simple exercises that became more complex in a nice way. And you realize that the details were just there because the authors don't want to save words on good explanations and examples.
In the second part, "Using Core Classes", the authors start to complement the contents of the different chapters, what means that they did a lot of work of re-writing and polishing prior to publishing. Also, after each exercise, there is a description telling you why you wrote that specific code. This is an achievement not always found in other books of this kind.
Not all the contents were crystal clear for me and there are more errata than I'd like, but they are not big problems actually.
The book is organized very well, from easy to hard, always remembering the previous issues. I have reached part three: "Working with Display Objects". I am enthusiastic.
In short, it is a great book, very powerful and useful if your aim is to learn ActionScript 2.0. I am enjoying each page, and it is very hard for me not to keep on reading and practicing with this nice guide. BUY IT
Excellent Book
Recently I had to do a project for work involving ActionScript 2.0.
I have a technical background and am quite knowledgeable in a multitude of programming languages and programming paradigms. This book got me to where I needed to be fast. I cannot say enough good things about it and the author. Well done!
It's certainly a learning experience/challenge
I've just opened the book for the first time to try to get a handle on XML and ActionScript by coding the examples on page 698. The comments attached to the code don't tell the real story of what is actually returned from the XML object/variables (my own trace commands displaying what each variable contained were more accurate) and there are a number of coding errors that I had to work out myself. It taught me something, sure, but I shouldn't have to be correcting the code along the way. It wasted time I didn't have.
Excelent resource
The book covers all of the bases. buttons, interactivity, sound and websites, more importantly, it is easy to comprehend and get the gist of actionscript 2 which will make it easier to pick up actionscript 3.
Good for begginers
If you don't know anything of Action, I recommend this book. Who knows a little bit, half of the book is great for you. That's it.
