Sorry to be a pain, but you are probably going to see alot of me on here asking rather dumb questions.
The problem I currently have is, how do you acquire the knowledge of actionscript? I understand it is a time consuming process, and I have accepted this but I have hit a brick wall.
I am really sturggling to find sources of information that relate to my skill level. I have no programming experience and no matter how much I read the help files I just can’t take and apply the information read. I can’t even make a movie clip move using the arrow keys let alone some of the amazing feats some people are accomplishing on this forum. As I stated, I understand it is something that comes with time, but I just don’t know where to start!
Granted, I can copy tutorials and get a result. But I feel like I am not learning, only copying. When it comes to hand coding the same thing I just copied from a tutorial my mind is blank, I can’t even replicate one line correctly.
It is not the case of motivation, interest and time as I am currently on a Computer Science degree. It is the lack of being taught what I need to do.
How does one learn to read and write, when one can’t read or write in the first place?
Thank you for your time, please help with my situation.
There are many great places to learn ActionScript 3. The first book that I would get if I were you is “Learning ActionScript 3” by Shupe & Rosser. It is an excellent beginners reference to learning the ActionScript programming language.
There are also many good website that feature tutorials. It will take some time and paitence to learn the skill set but if you are persistent, you can learn it.
Kirupa Forums are a great resource of information., the Adobe Forums are another good resource. Lee Brimlow, who writes for Layers magazine, runs a good website with tutorials, called www.gotoandlearn.com. Of course some of these sites will make the assumption that you have a starting knowledge of the programming language.
I have been working on building a set of tutorials on Beginning ActionScript 3 fundementals. There are 15 parts to the series so far, about 8 hours of video that take you through the basic concepts and build on that knowledge. The website is www.focusonflash.com.
Do a Google search, there are many other resources out there. If you have questions just ask. The Flash community is one of the most helpful communities that you will find.
Read the flash API. It’s really good documentation and they have examples for pretty much everything. You’ll want to learn the following classes:
flash.display.Sprite; flash.display.Graphics; flash.events.Event; flash.events.MouseEvent; flash.events.KeyboardEvents; Math; flash.utils.Timer; flash.events.TimerEvent
The following are less essential but good to know depending on the project:
flash.display.Bitmap; flash.geom.Matrix; flash.text.TextField; XML
People learn in different ways. Books, websites, tutorials, are all excellent ways of getting up to speed on things.
Don’t try to learn it all at once. Flash is huge. Take it one step at a time. Learn to do simple things, and build on that.
Think of something you’d like to be able to do in Flash, and then seek out the tutorials and other resources that will help you do that.
A lot depends on *why *you want to learn Flash. Like a lot of people, I’m principally interested in writing games. For me, that’s proved a neat way of learning about other aspects of programming in the past. Even if you’re only vaguely interested in games, you could do a lot worse than taking a look at something like Gary Rosenzweig’s book, AS3 Games Programming University. It doesn’t assume too much prior knowledge but soon has you getting to grips with real code.
You need to learn the basics of programming if you have no programming experience
You need to learn about functions/methods/subroutines, variables, arrays, control structures, syntax then possible OOP and all that comes with it etc etc
Most programming courses start with the basic ‘Hello World’ application - in which you are taught how to start your program and echo ‘Hello World’ to the screen. Of course Flash is a more object based approach with the Stage and design interface, so you have to treat it as object based a lot of the time.
I’d start with variables and syntax - it’s also helpful to have some understanding of what the computer is doing with all your code behind the scenes, it can help you understand why you must do things in a certain way.
It takes practice to get an eye for errors and often it’s just terminology which can stand in your way.
Anyway, I can help out if you want - I’m on MSN most nights after 7:00pm GMT, add me I can talk you through some stuff
I agree with DiamondDog, I’m just a beginner myself but I did get the gary rosenzweig book and its very very helpful. It helps you to think in code to solve problems. The Learn Actionscript 3 book is also excellent. I’d highly recommend these two books.
