Foundation ActionScript Animation: Making Things Move!

Excellent animation tutorial for the ActionScript enthusiast (26 of 27 Found this Helpful)   November 29, 2005
Being an old-fashioned programmer, I generally avoid script languages and try to do everything in traditional programming languages with one exception - ActionScript. From my first introduction to the language I've been hooked by its combination of power and simplicity. If you already have an intermediate grasp of ActionScript and want to learn how to make realistic animations using this language, this is the book for you. This book was written for someone familiar with ActionScript to some degree but with little knowledge of math or physics. As a matter of fact, if you are a mathematician or physicist, you probably will not truly appreciate this book due to its accessible style. This book is NOT about controlling tweens and simple animations. Instead, each chapter lays out the rules of physics, trigonometry, matrix algebra, vectors, and 3D mathematics very plainly and clearly while applying it to an animation problem. Part four of the book takes the principles you learned in the first three parts of the book and applies it to 3D animation. Each chapter intersperses code with equations and explanatory diagrams, and then at the end usually summarizes key algorithms in numbered steps. This book has a simply excellent treatment of both forward and inverse kinematics to the point that I would recommend its tutorials to robotics students that are having a hard time finding anything readable on the subject. If you don't think your ActionScript skills are up to the challenge of this book, might I recommend the excellent "Essential ActionScript 2.0" by Moock. If you don't know ActionScript, you will by the time you finish that book.

An Indispensable Tome (19 of 21 Found this Helpful)   December 24, 2005
I've been working in Flash and Actionscript since 2001. If I'd had this book when I was starting out it would have saved me countless hours of research and experimentation. Foundation Actionscript Animation is stuffed to the gills with useful programming techniques, yet is also very readable and concise.

Unlike so many authors, Keith Peters is not out to impress us with his cleverness and intellect. His main purpose is to share a wealth of practical knowledge that he's been building up over the years in a practical way. You won't find any cartoons or jokes in this book. Nor will you find digressions and distracting sidebars. Though it covers a number of complex topics in Math and Physics, it does not read like a textbook -- the author strives to explain only what is necessary to get things working.

Sometimes he is downright apologetic when he has to cover a difficult subject. At the start of the chapter on Momentum, he writes "I have reached a point where I just can't ignore mass any longer. Mass is just so tied up in the subject of momentum that I'm just going to have to confront it head on." If anything, this constant apologizing becomes a bit tiresome!

Flash has been an evolving platform over the years, and Actionscript Animation does an admirable job putting everything into a helpful historical perspective, showing how things have changed from Flash 5 to Flash 8. Chapter 2, is such a perfect overview of common techniques for building Flash applications that I have recommended it to some co-workers who are programmers, but who haven't had experience with Flash. The Flash 8 examples are usually in their own section of a chapter, and can be ignored if you're working with an older version.

I recommend this book even to veteran Actionscripters. Though this is not an OOP book, most of the examples are only about a function or two long, so you can easily convert them into methods for your classes. Furthermore, even topics you are comfortable with can worth reading about because Peters may surprise you with a new way to do something. For example, after covering the basics of Trigonometry, he immediately provides a number of useful examples of pulsing and elliptical motion that can be achieved with trig functions, including an interesting example that applies the function to the scale of a movie clip to create a pulsing effect.

The final chapters of the book cover basic 3D animation techniques. While I didn't feel ready to build the next Quake, I was grateful for the author's gentle introduction to a topic that is often presented in a very confusing way. When I was done, felt prepared to tackle a more difficult book on 3D graphics.

Though it's not designed to be a reference book, Foundation Actionscript Animation will certainly find a home near my computer. And next time I'm creating an SWF that involves collision detection, gravity or matrices, this is the first place I'll go for a refresher.

Scripts and theory for the interaction designer, game programmer, experience and user interface developer (8 of 8 Found this Helpful)   November 7, 2005
I found this book to be an excellent collection of scripts and theory for the interaction designer, game programmer, experience and user interface developer. The book covers ActionScript basics, OOP and best coding practices, classes, new Flash 8 features, lots of trig, and physics formulas for velocity, acceleration, friction and gravity. I would actually highly recommend this book to any designer who is thinking about picking up ActionScript. The coding practices and sample code will immediately spark your imagination, while setting you on the right track as to how to think about programming and structuring your code. You'll get instant gratification from learning how to build very interactive widgets quickly, while also enhancing your code libraries.

If you are a seasoned ActionScripter but never experimented with particles, collision detection, IK or 3D there are plenty of advanced scripts and theory for you as well. I was happy to see coverage of matrix math and the matrix class, considering their usage in Flash 8

Overall a great compilation of code and theory. It's complete, well written and for Flash 8!

In depth, clearly written introduction to a specific area of ActionScript programming (6 of 6 Found this Helpful)   February 8, 2006
Summary
Although the book has a few shortcomings (at least in my opinion) which will require the reader to have a solid grounding in ActionScript 2.0 syntax in order to make the best use of it, overall I think it is a very well-written, easy to understand and thorough guide to the subject of ActionScript animation. Considering it comes from a Flash developer who is one of the most well-known for this type of work, I think it is a great book to have if you are interested in learning more about that subject.

What I liked best

This book is well-written in terms of the sequence and clarity of the examples. He starts out explaining the basic principles (mostly trigonometry formulas) which underly the different animation behaviors. For the most part this is done in a clear, easy to understand way, even if you haven't studied math for several years (like me) -- all his examples are of common uses of the formula in ActionScript, and he's quick to point out which formulas you'll use all the time and which ones you'll use less frequently.

I also found the way he ordered the content, and the examples within each section, to be particularly helpful. Most topics build on the previous one, with clear and obvious connections between them.

Room for improvement

No book is perfect, of course, as any author will likely admit. These are the most noteworthy problems I found with this book. But let me say up front that I think the book is well-written enough and in-depth enough that it is worth owning in spite of these specific shortcomings:

- Narrow example domain

I can't complain too much about this one, but the examples both in code and in concepts in the book are almost entirely focused on creating video games in Flash. However, I think it's much more common to use these techniques for other things like user interface effects, something which (as far as I remember) wasn't even mentioned in the book.

- Unnecessary basic concepts

In the introductory portions of the book, Keith faces the typical book-author dilemma of "what should I assume is the prior knowledge of the reader." The book includes a couple of sections introducing basic ActionScript concepts such as functions and event handlers. However, I think those sections are ones he should have just left out completely -- the quick summary treatment isn't enough to really teach those concepts well if somebody doesn't already have experience with them, and it's just annoying filler for the reader who does already know what those things are.

- ActionScript version confusion

One of the stated goals of the way the code is written is that "it will work in ActionScript 2.0, and with few or no changes it will work in ActionScript 1 also." I disagree with this choice; I think at this point (two and a half years after the introduction of AS2, with ActionScript 3 already in the public eye) I don't think there's a very good reason to cater to the ActionScript 1 audience. I think it would have been better to just write the examples in pure AS2, and let people who need the code in AS1 work out the differences, especially since teaching AS1 isn't a stated goal of the book.

Fantastic Book (5 of 5 Found this Helpful)   March 15, 2006
This isn't just a great Flash book; it's a great read, too. The author claims this in the beginning even! It breaks down scary concepts like trigonometry, velocity, friction, and kinetics to really understandable language followed by some good best-practice AS2 code examples. This is not a reference book like ASDG, but it could be used that way if you want a good understandable source for animation/trig formulas missing from almost all books I've seen. I like how Keith is nice and humble and seems first to admit he wasn't all that good in math and still can figure this stuff out like the pro he is.