Learning Actionscript 3.0: A Beginner's Guide

by Shupe, Rich

• ISBN13: 9780596527877
• ISBN10: 059652787X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-12-01
• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc

Summary

In Learning ActionScript 3, author Rich Shupe shares the knowledge he's gained from his years as a multimedia developer/designer, and teacher. This book defines the basic components of how ActionScript and Flash work - and builds from there. After reading this book, readers will have a solid foundation in how ActionScript has developed into its current state, and how to use ActionScript 3 for practical, everyday projects. Main topics include object- oriented programming, logic, classes, event handling, basic design patterns, migrating AS2-based sites to AS3, and more. Rich uses exercises that help in learning various techniques, and short quizzes that help readers make sure they're up to speed with key concepts. The companion CD-ROM contains material for all the exercises in the book, as well as trial versions of popular software for graphics creation and editing, web-page and web-site creation, and audio- and video- integration.

Author Biography

Rich Shupe has been designing and developing with Flash since it was called FutureSplash, and has been teaching ActionScript programming to all levels of students since ActionScript became available. He founded his own training and development company, FMA, in 1995, and has been its president and technical director ever since. He is a recognized authority on several technologies, including Flash, Director and QuickTime. In addition to his production experience, Rich has been teaching professionally for 10 years, and is a full-time faculty member at New York's School of Visual Arts' Computer Art Dept. in both the Bachelors and Masters programs. He has also taught or lectured internationally for such organizations as London's Royal Academy of Art, Manchester's Museum of Science and Industry, New York University, and United Digital Artists, as well as trade shows such as MacWorld, QuickTime Live, FlashForward, Macromedia DevCon, and more. In a previous life, he worked with rock band/performance-art pioneers The Residents.

Zevan Rosser is a freelance designer/programmer/consultant and computer artist. He teaches ActionScript and Flash animation at New York's School of Visual Arts and FMA. When he's not working on commercial projects he works on his personal site, http://www.shapevent.com.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. xi
Getting Started	p. 1
ActionScript Overview	p. 3
What Is ActionScript 3.0?	p. 4
The Flash Platform	p. 7
Procedural Versus Object-Oriented Programming	p. 8
The Document Class	p. 9
Legacy Code Compatibility	p. 11
Core Language Fundamentals	p. 13
Miscellaneous Basics	p. 15
Variables and Data Types	p. 16
Conditionals	p. 17
Loops	p. 20
Arrays	p. 23
Functions	p. 24
Custom Objects	p. 26
this	p. 27
Absolute versus Relative Addresses	p. 27
Graphics and Interaction	p. 29
Properties, Methods, and Events	p. 31
Inherited Attributes	p. 32
Properties	p. 32
Events	p. 34
Methods	p. 39
Event Propagation	p. 41
Frame and Timer Events	p. 43
Removing Event Listeners	p. 46
The Display List	p. 49
The Sum of Its Parts	p. 50
Adding and Removing Children	p. 58
Managing Object Names, Positions, and Data Types	p. 63
Changing the Display List Hierarchy	p. 65
A Dynamic Navigation Bar	p. 68
Timeline Control	p. 71
Playhead Movement	p. 71
Frame Labels	p. 74
Frame Rate	p. 81
A Simple Site or Application Structure	p. 82
OOP	p. 87
Classes	p. 89
Inheritance	p. 93
Composition	p. 99
Encapsulation	p. 103
Polymorphism	p. 106
Navigation Bar Revisited	p. 111
Motion	p. 115
Basic Movement	p. 116
Geometry and Trigonometry	p. 119
Physics	p. 125
Programmatic Tweening	p. 130
Timeline Animation Recreations	p. 131
Particle Systems	p. 137
Drawing with Vectors	p. 141
The Graphics Class	p. 142
The Geometry Package	p. 149
The Motion Package	p. 158
9-Slice Scaling	p. 159
Applied Examples	p. 161
Drawing with Pixels	p. 167
Bitmap Caching	p. 168
The BitmapData Class	p. 170
Blend Modes	p. 177
Bitmap Filters	p. 180
Color Effects	p. 188
Image Encoding and Saving	p. 192
Text	p. 195
Text	p. 197
Creating Text Fields	p. 198
Setting Text Field Characteristics	p. 198
Selecting Text	p. 200
Formatting Text	p. 202
Formatting with HTML and CSS	p. 206
Triggering ActionScript from HTML Links	p. 209
Parsing Text Fields	p. 210
Loading HTML and CSS	p. 214
Sound and Video	p. 219
Sound	p. 221
ActionScript Sound Architecture	p. 222
Internal and External Sounds	p. 223
Playing, Stopping, and Pausing Sounds	p. 226
Buffering Streaming Sounds	p. 228
Changing Sound Volume and Pan	p. 229
Reading ID3 Metadata from MP3 Sounds	p. 231
Visualizing Sound Data	p. 234
Working with Microphone Sound	p. 236
Waveform Visualization	p. 239
Video	p. 251
Encoding	p. 252
Components	p. 254
Full-screen Video	p. 258
Captions	p. 260
Coding Your Own Video Playback	p. 272
Input/Output	p. 277
Loading Assets	p. 279
Loading Sound and Video	p. 280
Loading Text	p. 281
Loading Display Objects	p. 285
Communicating Across ActionScript Virtual Machines	p. 289
Taking a Brief Look at Security	p. 291
XML and E4X	p. 297
Understanding XML Structure	p. 298
Creating an XML Object	p. 302
Reading XML	p. 303
Writing XML	p. 310
Deleting XML Elements	p. 313
Loading External XML Documents	p. 314
Communicating with XML Servers	p. 315
An XML-Based Navigation System	p. 319
Programming Design and Resources	p. 331
Programming Design and Resources	p. 333
Programming Design Methodologies	p. 333
Object-Oriented Design Patterns	p. 339
Resources	p. 345
Index	p. 351
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.