<< LA Web Professionals Group (LAWPG Los Angeles)

Reference Library

files, bookmarks, contacts, notes, pictures, and more...

Reference Library Home | About | Filter by Date | Search

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects

Book posted 12/15/09 by chuckboc last edited 01/06/10
5,254 views, 0 comments.

Title
Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects

Author
Todd Yard

Genre
ActionScript3

ISBN
9781430218715

Review

If digital image manipulation is like painting, then this book is like listening to a painter describes a desired artistic effect, using Actionscript as a set of brushes, the classes as a palette, and Flash as the canvas.

More a creative workbook than a by the numbers tools tutorial, the many examples can be studied on their own, after a basic review of the drawing APIs. The author makes life easier by opening up some libraries after some additional preliminary background is covered.

The largest portion of the book (about 20 percent) is on bitmaps and bitmap data, which ultimately has to do with pixel manipulation, and the many and varied ways that can be done.

The book’s 628 pages are organized into 12 chapters, along with an Appendix that shows how to setup Flash, CS4 and FlexBuilder to work with ActionScript3. The relatively deep Index makes it fairly easy to quickly locate topics of interest.

Example code, organized by chapter, can be downloaded, with each having both Flash and Flex project folders. There are a few errors and typos that, while not intentional, help the reader’s debugging skills. However, some of AS3’s ‘newer’ constructs, most notably the Vector class, do not work with Flex3, but do with Flex4, which is still in Beta as of this writing and has a few wrinkles of its own.

While this book is not for beginners, it can serve as a good reference for studying how creative effects can be realized using AS3.

Keywords
actionscript, flash, flex