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Flash has always been a popular platform for both designers and developers. From its early days of website inception, to the powerful web features it offers today, Flash is starting to become mainstream in many websites due to its amazing way of providing digital interactive content. As always, the good people at Adobe are trying to push the envelope with what's possible to implement, and enable more developers to accomplish RI applications more readily. Because of this, ActionScript is continually being updated to allow newer and more sophisticated levels of interaction.

Enter Essential ActionScript 3.0 the latest book from author Colin Moock, a seasoned ActionScript coder with contacts to Adobe's engineers and years of research behind him. Moock has set to work in providing a solid reference book for the latest ActionScript 3.0, and at over 900+ pages, has certainly been thorough in this regard. A large amount of reading by any standard, but given the level of sophistication of the language, a necessity.

Moock begins by explaining the concepts behind ActionScript and how this works, providing simple metaphors to demonstrate class and object-orientated programming. From chapter one, we get involved in creating an ActionScript application, 'Virtual Zoo' which focuses on the elements I have just mentioned. This is a great exercise that spans the first third of the book, introducing many new concepts to users of varying arrays of skill, as well as demonstrating the fundamentals of ActionScript in a clear and concise manner. As this was more or less my introduction to ActionScript 3.0, it was the place to start and fairly simple to pick up and begin working on.

Throughout the book, Moock has also included three different types of symbols, designed to point out tips, traps and notes as you make your way through tutorials. The tips, designated by paw prints, contain useful information about the current topic of study, often highlighting important concepts and practices. Traps are designated by a bear trap, and are placed to help you avoid and solve annoying problems. And finally notes, designated by a snake, that will demonstrate and compare a concept between ActionScript 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0 helping you to understand the differences between the two versions of the language.

This book is divided into three parts, delving into a whole array of different functions within the chapters. These three parts cover the following areas of:

• Extensive coverage of the core of ActionScript 3.0, with such topics as object-orientated programming, classes, objects, variables, methods, functions, inheritance and arrays just to name a few.
• A greater in-depth look at visual and interactive programming topics including hierarchical event handling, mouse and keyboard interactivity, animation and content-loading operations.
• Advice on code production issues, such as combining ActionScript with assets created in Flash Authoring Tool, using Flex in Flex Builder 2, and creating code libraries.

Now there has been a few programming books I've read through in the last month, and I have to say that Essential ActionScript 3.0 is the easier of the bunch to pick up for beginners. The explanation from theory to actual coding is much more clearly explained, and readers of the book will find themselves understanding and beginning to code in quite a short amount of time. It is advised however not to jump ahead or skip around through the various chapters in the book, as once a technique is demonstrated, it is not repeated again, thus, clearly understanding a programming method is paramount to advancing within this book. If you are already comfortable with ActionScript however, then Moock suggests points throughout the tutorial to skip ahead to more advanced aspects of the lesson.

Personally I have taken on the newbie viewpoint of this book, as my ActionScript knowledge is nothing to brag about. But as previously mentioned, Moock does a much better job than some other books reviewed at explaining the basic concepts in easy metaphors, and providing written examples of how the correct code should appear. Once a function has been explained however, he ploughs right on, making the assumption that his initial explanation was enough to educate the reader, and highlighting the need to completely understand a concept before skipping ahead. This is a small negative however, and for the seasoned ActionScript coder or a fresh faced newbie, this book provides a great resource into ActionScript 3.0.