New user looking suggestions.

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Hello community,
I just signed up, after 10 years of last checking this website !

kirupa, flashkit, and some others, were the first sites I checked constantly for flash stuffs and now, I go back to the roots.

Anyway, after 14 years on the Flash world, I feel the need to move forward, and what better place to ask experienced Flash / AS3 devs ( like @senocular, btw, I followed all ur tutorials several years ago ) how did you guys manage to transition between languages and technologies.
I feel pretty stuck now. I made websites since 2006 'til 2011 in flash, then some Facebook games, then exclusively AIR apps (mostly business apps) 'til now.

So, through the years, I crafted my workflow, my “toolbox” and my way of doing projects,
and, eventually, I realized that AS3 is becoming seriously deprecated for getting new projects, so, even if I definitely LOVE working with it (and I still believe is a rock solid solution for multiplatform development) , I feel forced to move on.

I feel in a crossroads now, professionally speaking, most of my creative work is old and not accessible anymore (flash websites) and the latest projects I did are boring, private and closed source for big companies… So it kinda sux to start from scratch after all these years.

Dunno why, but I always felt like going back to fullstack webdev was somehow, involutive and painful, but I definitely wanna dig into it seriously. But I feel kinda lost with ALL the available options.

Sorry about the long post :stuck_out_tongue: , but I would like to know others people experiences… and maybe get some sort of feedback regarding how to start “re-wiring” myself onto new technologies.

Thanks beforehand for all the future help !

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For me it was a matter of necessity. Work says jump (i.e. stop working with Flash), I jump.

From there its just a matter of learning what you need in order to fulfill your goals. I’ve had prior JavaScript experience, but at the time, the landscape was starting to change dramatically - and rapidly - with Angular starting to take over and React not far behind. There was a new project we had started work on and the decision was made to use Angular for it. So I learned Angular (v1.0).

Fast forward to today and I’m working on a different project, though this one is built on Backbone. I didn’t know Backbone at the time, so I learned it… and in some ways, am still learning today (not so much how Backbone itself works, but the best way to use it which isn’t always as clear as other frameworks out there).

If you’re starting out on your own, it might be more difficult to get going. But I think it always helps to come up with a project idea and just do it. Now, as for what to use? Yeah, that can be confusing, but I would suggest React. I think its easy to pick up, and once you see how things work there, other similar frameworks/libraries will come more naturally.

On top of that, some of the more recent additions to JavaScript (ES6+) has made the transition from ActionScript a little easier I think, with things like the class keyword.

Best of all, Kirupa has even written a React book!

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The jump from AS to JavaScript was relatively painless, but fully understanding HTML and CSS took me a lot of effort. I’m still learning. Partly it is because we had a great IDE in Flash that made it easy to create visual things. The code part you always had to figure out and write anyway, but having to manually define the visuals was a big hurdle.

The transition took time and practice. I started by re-creating a lot of things I had created in Flash using just HTML/CSS/JS. Once I was able to figure out the DOM and how it operated, the remaining hurdles around build tools, optimizing for performance, etc. seemed easier by comparison.

You are definitely doing the right thing by migrating away from Flash and into become more of a fullstack dev. The future is pretty bright there, and once you’ve gotten good at HTML/CSS/JS, you should learn one good framework. I am biased towards React, but Angular, Vue, and a bunch of others are good as well :stuck_out_tongue:

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Wow, thanks for the fast replies guys! greatly appreciated.

Anyway, my main concern I think is to get my hands dirty, and there are way too many concepts to learn … following tutorials all the time seems awkward, and to be honest, I end up divagating into something else rather soon and losing focus (my bad here).

I have, like u guys, years of experience on my area, but when it comes to something new, after all this time, seems like the only real way to learn something properly is WORKING, having a project, like u said @senocular , and this becomes somehow impossible, as I have no previous knowledge/experience on webdev, is hard to get hired… is like the egg and the chicken paradox :smiley:

Do you advise to start with w3c and all the tuts here? Or maybe there’s another place with more “updated” content (as standards changes fast)?

I will try to get ur React book for sure @kirupa … any other advise of where to look for cool learning resources (from a dev)?

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I’m not a fan of w3c. I prefer MDN, but its better as a reference than for tutorials (they have tutorials, and they tend to be good, but I don’t believe there’s a clear track to follow… though I did just find this).

Some of the more popular tutorial sites are freecodecamp and codecademy and the like (throw codecademy into google and look at the related/people also searched for sites for others like it). These vary from free to paid but a lot of them have interactive coding tasks built in so you can learn and code at the same time which is pretty cool.

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Yep, I’m aware of those sites.
I guess is just a matter of jump in … I’ll see how it goes.
Any recommendation with IDEs or workflows for OSX ?

For instance, in AS3 I have my framework, Starling, Feathers, Greensock and a few other libs, I use IntelliJ, ShoeBox or TexturePacker for the images and, obviously, the AIR SDK…

Targeting ReactNative before a website is like running before walking ?
Can you give me some hints regarding tools?

Thanks!

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Atom, Visual Studio Code, Sublime, etc. are all good. My favorites among these are at Atom and VS Code, for they have a ton of extensions that allow you to customize and extend your coding environment in a variety of useful ways :stuck_out_tongue:

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I’m on VSCode now, following all your React tutorial, great work btw, and using npm lite-server.
I’m trying to get used to the lack of code-generation shortcuts, I have a lot of muscle memory in Intellij :smiley: to generate methods, accessors, vars declarations, code formatting, auto importing stuffs, etc.
I find tedious to not have code completion for JS code in react, and not have Emmet for all the JSX code, that’s the point of typescript no?. I have no clue how to setup everything properly.
Thx guys for being super responsive!

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Intellij has react support if you prefer using that. VS Code (which is what I use) tends to be one of the more popular free editors.

There are also a number of code generation plugins for Code, and is it possible that emmet is built in? … https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2017/08/07/emmet-2.0

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Great thread.

That reads much like an honest and reflective poem about ex - Flash developers. It really strikes a nerve and brings back feelings, and I think nicely sums it up for many whom have traversed this same thing. Thanks for being so honest with what you posted and shared.

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@BestBeards you’re slacking - you missed liking one of kirupa’s posts

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I like kirupa’s post

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There’s two. You only liked the second one :wink:

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Don’t worry, I got it.

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Back to Emmet, saw this today: https://css-tricks.com/can-vs-code-emmet/

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Hi!

I´m back after many years away.
Have been lucky enough to use JS in many projects after flash got less popular. I would like to recommend WebStorm from JetBrains and Intellij! It is powerful!

I´m still missing the interactive sites that flash provided but mobile is more important now.

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Welcome back.

Do you have WebStorm only or other bundled packs? Do you feel it has more built in verse say Atom or Visual Studio Code and plugins for each? What separates it for you?

Immersive sites still exist with creative use of CSS, JS, various other libraries, etc., but yes mobile performance has to be considered prominently, with features/effects being throttled back accordingly.

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I use Intellij because I build Java applications with react/angular on the front end. I´m very happy with how many great add ons you can find. If you only do JS, I still find Intellij great for debugging and development. Atom was build for light JS dev but if you have big projects, I recommend Intellij or WebStorm. It has great coding experience and very intelligent tools that can help you. It works well out side of the box with JS and Java frameworks.

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Thanks for the response @Wayne, I appreciate your usage feedback. They have a nice suite of products, I’ve only used the free IntelliJ IDEA Community Version, but thats all. I am certainly impressed and joyful with them being from PRG, CZ. However prg 4 not prg9, but its all nice. :grinning:

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