What this book does, it does very well. It illustrates the new syntax and methods of AS3, and shows you exactly how to use them. It is illustrated and organized so efficiently that it can function as a "cookbook" reference.

It's a deceptively compact book, very handsomely bound and thoroughly illustrated with color screenshot examples. It is much better printed than earlier lynda-dot-com H-O-T Flash books (cleaner typography, opaque paper for color printing), though inside there's a superficial family resemblance. You get a series of step-by-step, read-and-type exercises, as well as a few supporting video tutorials. It even uses the old "snowboarder" example that the H-O-T books have used for the last three versions of Flash.

As I say, the resemblance is only superficial. The tutorials are much more concentrated than is usual. The chapters and subsections are short--a key concept may be covered and demonstrated in just two or three pages--but this concentration of material can make it very slow-going, requiring two or three re-reads. The few videos provided seem to be there merely for tradition's sake and add little to the tutorials.

I recommend this book but do not recommend attempting to learn AS3 from this book alone. Its virtue is its limitation: the author covers all the basics, seldom digressing from his lessons, so you may feel cramped and distracted if you try to cover more than one chapter at time. What you're missing is commentary and elbow room, a sense of overall context and practical application. For this you should get the Shupe/Rosser book (Learning ActionScript 3.0) and two or three others.

You might also get Todd Perkins's follow-on to this book, '...Beyond the Basics,' also from lynda. Though more advanced, it recaps this book's material very well, and being a series of short video tutorials is easier to follow. Put both Todd Perkins efforts together, and you get one fine five-star tutorial on how to code ActionScript 3.0.

If you are an animator looking to enter the world of actionscript, or you just don't have much development experience, then this book may be appropriate, but for anyone else the useful content could be compressed to the size of a pamphlet.

As for the accompanying CD, I found the content on this to be totally useless, there are much better video tutorials available on-line for free.

The author takes you step-by-step through useful examples that make the learning flow very easily from basic to intermediate. The style is crisp, with just the right amount of humor. Perfect to get your grounding if you are just getting into ActionScript 3.0

I am a regular user of Flash, however ActionScript (other than the really basic stuff) has always been a mystery to me. This book helped me to understand it in a way I never thought possible. I highly recommend it.

I had a really tough time with this book. The explanations are inadequate and often very confusing. I found Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Rich Shupe much easier to understand. This book might be a nice reference for people who have some AS3 under their belt, I haven't tried using it for that purpose, but if you need a way into AS3, this book will frustrate you. Perkins may be good at programming, but a teacher he is not. He's completely out of touch with what it's like to be a creative person trying to learn programming and he has no idea how to bridge that gap. He's a computer geek, not a communicator. Shupe is better.