Brajeshwar

Much like a hollywood flick, Essential Actionscript 2.0 releases on friday, the 18th June, 2004.
For Flash Developers and Designers alike, I need not re-iterate that it is a must have. Yesterday, as anticipated, the knock on the door from the Fedex guy was my pre-release copy. I will try to write about the book by dividing the review into three parts.
I started from Part 3 and will go to Part 1 at the end. Well, it is not that I am already through with Actionscript 2.0 or alike but that the later part caught my attention first.

So, this summer, get ready to tickle your Actionscript skill and hone your application development skill and catapult to another advanced level. Thanks to Colin Moock for the book and his contributions to the Flash Community.

Part 3 of the book discusses four design patterns (Observer, Singleton, Model-View-Controller and Delegation Pattern), that are applicable to Flash, and shows how to use them to structure sections of an Actionscript 2.0 application.

The reason for choosing the four patterns according to the book were;

• They’re extremely well known and relatively easy to understand.
• They address event architectures, an important part of OOP that affects nearly every application.
• They demonstrate tangible, practical ways to develop user interfaces in OOP, which is perhaps the most important aspect of Flash Application development.
  
  Moock repeats history in easing an average user grasp some intimidating subject. The sample codes will carve a good way in making it easy for most coders to understand and implement the same in Flash Application Development. Personally, I like his avoidance of cliche about Actionscript which sets it apart, making the reading experience a smooth glide (did I say slimmy like the June bug?).
  Order/pre-order your copy through Colin’s EAS2 Site. You can read Chapter 2; Object-Oriented Actionscript of the book and read how this book differs from AS the definitive guide. Read more about what’s in the book.

References that I wish to bookmark from the book:

• Design Patterns in Java
• Design Patterns; Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by GoF.
• Extreme Programming Rules
• Use your singleton wisely
• How to use Model-View-Controller

Of course many other links were there which are very worth bookmarking, I suggest looking at them when the book is released. Ok, here is a small note which I will mention but then I hope the proof readers have already seen them and is corrected; a misleading info in the book was that the warning and tip icon being interchanged on page xix which was supposed to be the icons explaining what they indicate.what’s in the book.