A Solid Foundation For Growth

Both Friends of ED and its labelmate Wrox Press are renowned for their publishing model—the tree. At Wrox, the home of programmer to programmer teaching and learning books forenamed Beginning lead to books part-named Professional and beyond, like a tree’s form elevates from root through trunk and branch.
      Start at the beginning, progress to pro, and keep in mind those related subjects you will inevitably also need to study. No program exists in isolation, and careers do not grow by standing still. Friends of ED recognises this pattern, and the books building the roots of its tree have names beginning with the word Foundation.
      The Studios are what comes next, with have the aim of exposing you to a range of current professional practices. Gain an understanding of one subject stream through its Foundation and Studio books, then consider the next stream you will need in order to broaden your career.
      There are several salient trends in computer book publishing. There are the rehashes and extensions of the manualÛwhich is fine if you have lost the manual or never had one. There are the recipes and greatest hits books, tantalising you with great results that seem within reach. You follow the sample exercises, build some little widget or demo that proves a principle, imagine something more ambitious and closer to a real life project, riffle through the book’s pages in search of the rest of the knowledge you will need to make something useful, then you flounder.
      Then there are the blatantly self-promoting books that put forward the authors as some kind of computational rock stars, and there are mercifully few of those. You are dazzled by the writers expertise for a while, and when you get over wondering if you could ever be that good you realise their book is not going to do much to help you to get where they are already.
      And then there are the books that set out to teach you in a true and realistic manner. So long as you work through each chapter in sequence the doors of knowledge will swing open and you will end up far more expert than you ever realised possible. FoED’s Foundation books are designed on that principle, and they work. Sham Bhangal is an inspired choice of author, and it is interesting to note that his name is one of the few to reoccur throughout Friends of ED’s list of Flash titles.
      Foundation ActionScript is an excellent introduction into using ActionScript to build the kind of Flash sites readers will want to revisit. If you have shied away from the idea of programming Flash, then shy no more. Build Foundation ActionScript’s web site under Sham Bhangal’s guidance, and you will be ready for bigger and better things. And you might want to take a look at Flash 5 ActionScript Studio next.

The Book:

• Title: Foundation ActionScript
• Author: Sham Bhangal
• Publisher: Friends of ED
• Published: 2000
• Pages: 494
• Illustrations: Monochrome
• ISBN: 1903450322
• Rating: 4

• Starting Out
• Making Plans
• Timeline Actions
• Basic Interactivity
• Navigation Tricks
• Variables
• Loooping and Decision Making
• Sound
• Advanced Interactivity
• Modular ActionScript
• Sprites