Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!

For animation and programming outside the Adobe Flash interface, this is one of the best books I have read. It starts out with an introduction to concepts that apply across the board for animation and then continues on in to physics based animation and eventually 3D programming. While the book uses ActionScript as the primary language, the concepts it employs easily translate into other graphical programming languages. Something to keep in mind when you order this book is that it will not teach you how to use Adobe Flash. While "Making Things Move" is very applicable to this program, it is geared more towards Flex Builder 2 and the Flex/AS 3 command-line compiler and Flex 2 SDK (the last two of which are free from Adobe's website at the time of writing this review). If you are looking for a book that will help you get started with Flash-based game development, this is a great book to use. I would consider it an excellent resource for both novice and advanced users. If you are looking for a book on developing sites that interact with databases or send and retrieve online data, this is not the book for you. Instead I would suggest The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0. Another resource I would reccomend for any Flash developer is ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers, which is good for just about anything else "Making Things Move!" and "The Essential Guide" don't cover.

Frankly trig was always a puzzle to me, let alone how to apply it. Keith managed to break that ice with my favorite development tool - Actionscript. Mind you it is easier to just drop Flash formulas that use trig into code and use them. But to have a basic understanding of how they work is power. Keith is an excellent writer. He mixes just enough explanation between code examples. The code examples are powerful demonstrations of the concepts he presents but very small and easy to follow. As well they are conveyed in Actionscript 3 format and provided as downloads. I have typed in code examples from the book as well and they are perfect. I also simply compiled all the download files with the mxmlc runtime compiler and they worked nicely. The follow-up at the end of each chapter is refreshing. There you find all the formulas developed in the chapter. As well they are all listed in chapter 19 Tips and Tricks. This is a concentrated book over 500 pages. So plan on time to digest it. However it is worth your time. I have chiped my way through part two Basic Motion and enthusiastically working into part three advanced motion.

This is probably the best book on actionscript animation and doing graphics with actionscript I've ever read. It rocks and Keith's style of writing is phenomenal. The math and physics sections are particularly great as he really lays it down. The 3d chapters in the back are something anyone who is really into 3d should understand and grawk. I've used information from this book in my professional work easily because I understood the concepts clearly. Overall this book is not for a beginner but someone wanting to take their actionscript knowledge to the next level in animation and design.

Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation Making Things Move! by Keith Peters Publisher: Friends of Ed IBSN:-13 (pbk):978-1-59059-791-0 Copyright 2007 Review by: Linda Weller I highly recommend reading this book even if you don't know what this (!) is. The book, similar to it's AS 2.0 counterpart. Keith Peters does a very good job of explaining the AS 3.0 language in a simple encouraging way. After hearing him say "this is really simple" about 1000 times during the book, you start saying it yourself. Math, Physics, Trig, Pythagorean Theorem in Flash -- no problem, easy not like your college Physics course. If effects or game ideas is what your looking for you can find them here. On of the best things talked about in this book is in the foreword by Arial Balkan. He explains that today programmers are artists and designers are ActionScripter's. Bravo!! He starts with programming basics. How to use Flash with in the Flex format is not covered in this book. Keith is your personal mentor, he is really rooting for you. He knows you can do it and shows you how easy it really is. First you learn how to make classes. Then he moves on to Rendering Techniques (using the drawing API) His philosophy is to give you class snippets and let you combine them into your own projects and games. Your goal being, to see how many of these classes you can combine. He goes on to explain basic motion incorporating such concepts as velocity, acceleration, friction and moving objects around. In this book, it's all about the Greeks. He introduces the section on Easing and Springs with an explanation of Xeno's Paradox. Keith tells you which hit test to use with which shape. "How do I bounce something off of an angled surface?" The answer is here. As you have probably guessed, "it is not that hard." Then moving on to bound checking with getBounds. Next, there is the section on billiard ball physics and mass momentum. Each well explained section of the book is supplied with downloadable code samples and simple formula explanations. Following that he delves into particle attraction and gravity, the slingshot effect, and "g" forces. He throws out a few game ideas for you to explore along the way. The book then covers Kinematics (making things walk), and 3D animation and, learning to locate things in virtual space. The great part about the code he gives you is that it just builds on itself as you read through the book. As he progresses, he adds the new items in bold allowing you to quickly scan the page and see what is new. As you near the book's end, you have almost memorized the rest of the code. And if you haven't the last chapter holds the formulas for all the chapters that you have just read to reinforce your learning and as a quick reference.

"Boing Boing Boing!" Keith Peters's engaging and readable book on Flash 9, Actionscript 3.0 Animation is quite unusual for a programming techniques book. It assumes you know very little, but it ends up being an authoritative work of lasting value. Notwithstanding the "3.0" in the title, this is the second edition of "Making things Move," updated for Actionscript 3.0. The first version sold very well, but I think the second edition will open up Flash to a much wider audience. This is because Peters almost always gives you two or three ways of doing something, and this extends to whatever Flash development environment you have chosen. There are three ways you can write Actionscript 3 for Flash: The Flash IDE (which you get when you buy Adobe Flash), Flex Builder 2 (which you get when you buy Adobe Flex Builder) and the free Flex 2 SDK (which you get when you download Flex SDK free from the Adobe website.) I use the third environment, so I really appreciate that "Making Things Move" tells you how to set up "trace" for debugging in the free Flex SDK environment. Because of the popularity of Flash animation, and the fact that the book tells you how to use the free development environment (and the fact that Actionscript 3 is so great), I think this book will be both popular and influential. So, I found nuts and bolts information in the very beginning that was probably worth the price of the book even if I didn't animate a single bouncing ball, but what's the rest of the book about? Three things that everyone learned (or should have learned) in school: trigonometry, physics and how to think about stuff on your own. And you get it an applied context that basically gives you everything you need to build, and to understand how to build, an interactive 2D or 3D game -- except fancy graphics, of course. User interaction, moving objects around, collision detection (two or three different methods), how to use acceleration and velocity for springing and easing, billiard ball physics, how to make things walk (forward kinematics) and reach for stuff (reverse kinematics), plus rotate collide and move in 3 dimensions, it's all in the book. All completely comprehensible. Various ways of placing things randomly on the screen, how to bounce back after colliding, how to swarm objects and connect them to each other? All covered. Matrix math, Brownian motion? Covered and explained. About the only thing Peters doesn't give you is the rotation matrices for four-dimensional graphics, but to be perfectly fair, nobody else does either. This book is a product of tons of experience and thoughtfulness. Each technique appears to be so simple -- certainly there isn't too much code in any one example -- and yet along with each technique, it seems like there's at least one little `gotcha' that Keith Peters tells you how to avoid. In other words, you can scan the book quickly to see what's in it, to see what's there and examine the formulas, and then when yo