Best ActionScript 3 Introduction Books/Tutorials?

Question

What are you choices?

Answer 1

Honestly, the best starter (and finisher!) book is Moock's Essential Actionscript 3.0. It's smart, well-written and very easy to read cover to cover. If you're going to be doing Flex development, you should also pick up Programming Flex 3 as well. It has (IMO) the best description of the Flex Component life-cycle.

Answer 2

TypeOneError, I respectfully disagree : )

Moock's is a great book, but I cannot see anybody reading it "cover to cover". I have a copy at home and I open it only when in doubt about something specific. Then I read the chapter regarding said doubt and usually I get the answer, a good pointer to the solution or something else I didn't know but interesting nonetheless.

It's also focused to developers, not designers keep that in mind.

And slightly off-topic, but the best piece of advice that I didn't read anywhere for doing the transition to AS2 to AS3 is install the debug version of the Flash player. AVM2 is very sensitive but it fails silently for any of these reasons:

• Wrong parameter type
• Wrong number of parameters
• Accessing a variable when is null
• etc.

If you are developing with the debug version, you'll get a loud and clear error that you can quickly fix, otherwise your app would just stop without a warning.

HTH!

Juan

Answer 3

I have had good experience with Lynda.com. They provide both the tutorial and the exercise files to go with them. Not only that, but they also have many levels of tutorial, which means that you'll be able to tune up pretty quick.