Foundation ActionScript - Softcover

Bhangal, Sham

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1903450322 ISBN 13: 9781903450321

Publisher: friends of ED Ltd, 2001

Synopsis

The stun design site, constructed as the case study in Foundation ActionScript, is viewable at www.friendsofed.com/extras/1903450322/stun/index.html. Flash 5 is Macromedia's incredibly successful motion graphics creation package. Flash 5 implements a vastly expanded and more powerful range of ActionScript components. It is ActionScript, coupled with Flash's exceptional graphical facilities, that makes Flash the de facto standard for interactive, graphically-rich web sites and applications. The new implementation makes ActionScript an even more important part of the Flash landscape. Foundation ActionScript provides a raft of new features for the Flash designer to use. To fully exploit these features, the designer will need to understand a basic set of programming constructs and principles. This book will teach those principles in the Flash 5 context, providing the reader with a solid base to develop more complex ActionScript skills. The book has a strong tutorial thrust, focusing on building the core skills that the reader needs to master Flash ActionScript. The skills and techniques are built in self-contained chapters that combine into an ongoing case study to build a rich knowledge base in the reader's mind. What you’ll learnWho this book is forFlash 5 beginners who've read an introductory text and need a much more in-depth introduction to ActionScript. Flash 4 users who need a fuller understanding of ActionScript as implemented in Flash 5.

About this title

Review

Foundation ActionScript is aimed at those who have some experience of Flash, perhaps having produced a few timeline-based Flash movies. Like Flash 5 Magic with ActionScript the concepts and procedures are demonstrated through the development of a "real-life" (in the sense that it includes the kind of content you would expect to find on a real-life professionally produced site Web site), in this case called Stun.com.

Sham Bhangal kicks off in the shallow end with a chapter entitled Starting Out and moves on to Timeline Actions and Basic Interactivity. From then on it's competent swimmers only as Navigation Tricks, Variables, Looping and Decision Making and Sound get the Foundation treatment on the way to more advanced chapters covering advanced interactivity and modular programming.

Short step-by-step projects--Adding a Label to a Timeline, Stopping and Restarting a Timeline, Running a Timeline Backwards--demonstrate individual techniques which go together to complete a particular site feature. In between the projects there's lots of elaboration and boxed out copy provides hints, tips and asides on related topics.

For a book about programming, by an author with an engineering background, it's to Bhangal's credit that he rarely loses sight of the fact that ActionScript is simply a means to a creative end. --Ken McMahon

From the Publisher

Foundation ActionScript assumes a basic knowledge of the Flash essentials, frames, symbols tweens and the like, but little or no knowledge of programming. That doesn't mean that you're shortchanged. Foundation ActionScript will give you the full story, straight from a working web designer. You know that you need to produce sophisticated dynamic web sites to keep ahead of current Flash-based design and you don't have time to waste. The Foundation series knows that too. You'll get there quicker than you think.

Edition details

• Publisher: friends of ED Ltd
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1903450322
• ISBN 13: 9781903450321
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 484