Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! by Keith Peters

Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Moveby Anonymous

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April 17, 2007: Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation by Keith Peters publisher: Friends of Ed IBSN:-13 (pbk):978-1-59059-791-0 copyright 2007 Review by: Linda Weller I highly recommend reading this book, especially if you haven't read the AS 2.0 version. The books are quite similar except the As 3.0 version is 500 pages about 50 pages longer than the AS 2.0 version. You just have to weigh in on whether you can update all the code to AS 3.0 yourself. If you opt to buy the book, Keith Peters does a very good job of explaining the AS 3.0 language in a simple encouraging way. After hearing him say 'this is really simple' about 1000 times during the book, you start saying it yourself. AS 3.0 really is a better, less quirky language than AS 2.0. If you are new to these Making Things Move book, you are really in for a pleasant surprise. Math, Physics,Trig, Pythagoran Theorum in Flash -- no problem, easy not like your college Physics course, no way. If you would like to do some of the cooler things with Flash look into this book. If effects or game ideas is what your looking for you can find them here. He gives you a mini start-up course on programming basics and then details how we do it now in AS 3.0. He is on top of all the varieties of AS 3.0 as well. He tells you how to use it with the new CS3 Flash IDE, Flex Builder 2.0 and the free Flex 2 SDK. If you are looking for info on Flex and how to use Flash with in the Flex format this is not the book for you. Keith is your personal mentor, he is really rooting for you. He will have you AS 3.0 or else. He knows you can do it and shows you how easy it really is. First you learn how to make classes, then there is a Trig lesson. It is very non-intimidating. Do yourself a favor and try it!! It is very empowering. Next he moves on to Rendering Techniques (using the drawing API) His philosopy about teaching is to give you class snippets and let you combine them into your own projects and games. Your goal being to see how many of these classes you can combine. Then he goes on to expain basic motion and incorporating such concepts as velocity, acceleration, friction and mving objects around. In this book it's all about the Greeks. He introduces the section on Easing and Springs with an explanation of Xeno's Paradox.(if you move something from point A to point B and move it one half way between the two then onehalf way between the mid point and B and one half way again and again - you will never reach your target.) Keith tells you which hit test to use with which shape, co-ordinate rotation around a point, and that age old Flash question: 'How do I bounce something off of an angled surface?' This is kind of top secret, you will have to read the book to find that out. But of course in true Keith Peters form he tells you it is not that hard. It isn't. It is just figuring out the answer initially that would be hard. Then moving on to bound checking with getBounds. He explains that this is like the bounding box that we use for the Flash 8 timeline. And of course, there is the section on billard ball physics. and mass momentum. This section is extremely well explained and really just fascinating. Each part of the book is fully supplied with downloadable code samples and formula explainations so simple a child could understand them. This book is really the secret weapon you need in your code arsenal. Next he delves into particle attraction and gravity, the slingshot effect, g forces. He...