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ActionScript 2.0 Garage Review by Julian Suggate
Entertaining and inaccurate
These days, with the vast array of technical books available to readers, every book and its publisher is trying to achieve some angle that will entice potential buyers. "ActionScript 2.0 Garage", as the name implies, is no exception. From the book's introduction, where the author states he is aiming for an attitude of "helpful smart-alec (or 'chaotic good' if you're old-school)", through to its lack of a conclusion or wrap-up, the tone is informal and chatty.
Dan Livingston's book covers several important topics such as drawing with ActionScript 2.0, the Flash IDE (focusing on the Actions Panel), Preloading and Event Handling. However, he fails to cover several topics which I would have liked to see explained. Event scope delegation and important classes such as DepthManager, alternative component sets, open source Flash and alternative compilers are completely left out.
To give Livingston his due, the section "Classes and Objects: An Introduction" is brilliantly thought out. If you struggle with this concept, the book almost redeems itself in these two short pages, as the author uses what was to me an entirely new metaphor to describe classes and objects. This metaphor works extremely well and avoids the overly theoretical and academic discussions so common in other introductions to Object Oriented Programming. However, the next section ("Your First Class") immediately disappoints, containing an example class whose code will not even compile.
Unfortunately, the inaccuracies are not limited to the syntax of some of the book's examples. In the author's explanations of important concepts, such as static vs dynamic typing, it is clear that he lacks precise understanding. There is no excuse for such inaccuracy in a technical publication, given the fact that there are so many other works available in this area that do not suffer from these problems.
Finally, the book suffers from a lack of consistent target audience. The author claims in his introduction that the book is for beginning to intermediate ActionScript developers, yet he insists on giving indepth explanations of simple statements, such as the ActionScript "if( form.myText.indexOf('@') )".
Dan Livingston's humorous devices could have done a great job of encouraging readers new to programming. Possibly, this will still happen. Unfortunately, readers who are unable to correct Dan's often confusing and inaccurate examples will rapidly become discouraged, most likely assuming that it is they who are in error when in fact it is this book.
In conclusion, ActionScript 2.0 Garage's chatty style would have been relaxing and enjoyable if I wasn't nervous about the author's technical know-how. To anyone who knows Dan Livingston, congratulations for he would be a great guy to have at a party. But this book needs revision.