Migration from design to programming, AS3

Question

I've got in over my head trying to learn programming, but love it. How would you teach a designer to migrate from design to object oriented programming?

My interest is AS3 in Flash IDE, but any advice is welcome. Looking for a full explanation.

THOUGHTS
Designers learn differently
Designers may need visual cues
Designers may have different working habits, some bad, some just different

Answer 1

I suggest to go ahead with "Learning Actionscript 3" by O'Reily. It is a very useful book that guides you step-by-step throughout the process of learning AS3. For instance, it will show you how to directly code a textbox, without having to create it using the textbox tool itself. Plus, there are a lot of example codes on the website, as well as quizzes to help you "revise" the material.

I do recommend another book, entitled "Actionscript 3.0 Bible", which can be used as a reference guide in case you ever forget anything, or even as a learning guide that covers almost everything.

Check out this list of learning tools for AS3. Might be useful.

Answer 2

If your interest lies in AS3 then I would highly suggest Essential Actionscript 3.0 by Colin Moock. It's an excellent resource for learning AS3/OOP. It also serves as an excellent reference once your comfortable writing general code.

As for learning your way around the Flash IDE, practice is going to be the best approach, but I might also suggest Lynda.com. Good luck!

Answer 3

I'd recommend reading over Colin Moock's "Essential ActionScript 3.0," published by O'Reilly, to get familiar with the language. Either that, or Adobe's "Programming ActionScript 3.0," which is provided with the Flash or Flex IDE.

Beyond those, I'd recommend the ActionScript 3.0 Language Reference. Just keep that handy and you'll eventually memorize the most common APIs.

Answer 4

The first thing I would advise is to make sure that you get into good habits early, by that I mean you refactor when you need to, avoid programming on the timeline, make sure you adhere to best practices, format nicely etc It seems a lot of designers tend to be rather messy, dynamic sorts and when they then get into coding produce a house of horrors.

The second thing to do is to learn the basics of programming theory and not get too caught up in the intricacies of Flash to start off with. Some things you should know:

• What is a class, why use classes?
• Difference between static and instances
• Understand various datastructures like Arrays, Hashtables, Binary Trees, Linked Lists etc and know which suits which purpose best.
• Understand inheritance and be able to spot when to use it
• Understand polymorphism
• While not applicable to ActionScript, be aware of Generics
• Have an understanding of memory management, better yet have a look at an unmanaged language like C++. Understanding how memory is allocated and the purpose of pointers. Doing so improves ones knowledge of what Flash is doing behind the scenes.
• Be aware of design patterns

Hopefully I haven't scared you off. Now in reality you don't need to have knowledge of all of these things, you can still code and experiment and produce something. But having knowledge of the above list is essential if you really want to get into programming and be able to write good code on large projects.

Answer 5

I've always found for those just heading out - if possible have a glance at Lynda tutorials. There OK, can be a bit tedious and miss advanced details, but it's a great companion to the O'Reily books.