Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!

Flash has long been one of the most approachable, user-friendly tools for creating web-based animations, games, and applications. This has contributed to making it one of the most widely used programs for creating interactive web content. With each new version of Flash, ActionScript, its built-in scripting language, has become more powerful and a little more complex, too. ActionScript, now at version 3.0, has significantly matured as a programming language, bringing power and speed only previously dreamed about to Flash-based animation, going far beyond traditionally used keyframes and tweens.

The material inside this book covers everything you need to know to harness the power of ActionScript 3.0. First, all the basics of script-based animation and setting up an ActionScript 3.0 project are covered. An introduction to object-oriented programming follows, with the new syntax, events, and rendering techniques of ActionScript 3.0 explained, giving you the confidence to use the language, whether starting from scratch or moving up from ActionScript 2.0.

The book goes on to provide information on all the relevant trigonometry you will need, before moving on to physics concepts such as acceleration, velocity, easing, springs, collision detection, conservation of momentum, 3D, and forward and inverse kinematics. In no time at all, you'll both understand the concepts of scripted animation and have the ability to create all manner of exciting animations and games.

ActionScript animation (rather than tweened animation created within the Flash IDE) is a very popular discipline for Flash developers to learn, as it allows for the creation of smaller, more realistic, more dynamic, animated Flash movies, with realistic physics, such as gravity and collisions. This essential skill set has been learned by many Flash developers through Keith Peter's best-selling ActionScript animation book—Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making things move...

...and now we've updated it to ActionScript 3, Adobe's new and improved scripting language—all of the code has been updated, and some new techniques have been added to take advantage of ActionScript 3's new features, including including the display list and new event architecture. The code can be used with the Flash 9 IDE, Flex Builder 2, or the free Flex 2 SDK.

Keith lives in the vicinity of Boston, MA, in the USA with his wife Kazumi and their new daughter Kristine. He has been working with Flash since 1999, and has co-authored many books for friends of ED, including Flash MX Studio, Flash MX Most Wanted, and the ground-breaking Flash Math Creativity.

In 2001 he started the experimental Flash site, BIT-101 (www.bit-101.com), which strives for a new, cutting edge, open source experiment each day. The site recently won an award at the Flashforward 2003 Flash Film Festival in the Experimental category. In addition to the experiments on the site, there are several highly regarded Flash tutorials which have been translated into many languages and are now posted on web sites throughout the world. Keith is currently working full time doing freelance and contract Flash development and various writing projects.