Where to begin learning Flex and Flash

Question

I want to start developing Flash and Flex applications so that I can put all of the concepts floating around in my head into action. The problem is that I have never done any programming nor dealt with code...ever. I have worked in the graphic design industry and a lot of the storyboarding features in Flash are intuitive to me. Additionally, I've gone through some tutorials on Flex through the Adobe website, and although I pick up on the concepts well and can do the assignments, I'm not fully understanding the language (it's only been a week though).

My question is this: Should I just keep going with the Flex tutorials and work my way through MXML and ActionScript? or should I start by learning a different base language first? I've learned several languages in my life (Spanish, French, Italian) and with those, I didn't really understand the language until I jumped in, went to the country, and just struggled through it. Is it the same with MXML and ActionScript? Should I just struggle through it? Or do I need a base first? If I need a base, what would you suggest?

Answer 1

JavaScript is a good language to look at if you want to learn something similar to ActionScript, but if you are really interested in using Flex and Flash, you might as well just dive into it.

As you get more experience you'll find that you will also be able to read code in other languages and learn from examples of core concepts in most popular languages. Like spoken languages, the rules are pretty consistent, the grammer and vocabulary just change.

I have always found working through a language and researching when I have specific questions makes the process faster, plus I tend to remember the things I struggled on a little better.

Answer 2

It depends on where you want to go.

If you're aimed towards making "application"-like content - that is, buttons, pulldown menus, tab and accordion frames and so on, then probably you should keep on with the Flex tutorials. Flex is a framework, remember - it will spare you more of the gritty details if what you want to do is aligned with it.

If you want to make more generally expressive content - games, unique menus, highly interactive experiences and the like, then learning Flex would probably be a sidetrack. You'd be better off focusing on ActionScript itself.

Since you're starting from zero, you should also consider how far you plan on going. If you hope to eventually be able to handle complicated, heavily script-driven content, then you'd be better off learning ActionScript 3 and pretending AS2 doesn't exist. However, if you need to learn "enough" scripting to get the job done, but you don't plan on getting married to it, then you might prefer to do the reverse. AS2 is much more ad-hoc, and less strict. It has more whippituppitude, as they say. But for complex work AS3 is far better.

As for learning other languages, I'd say not so much. AS2 is very similar to JavaScript, and AS3 is very similar to Java, but you'll understand much better how to make good Flash content if you learn the scripting together with the authoring tool, and you'll come away more able to grok Flash's internal structure and the attendant possibilities and limitations.