The book is in excellent condition and I got it before the deadline,
It was great!

This book is a good as they come. It is well written, well organized and well supported with demo files. I have a wide variety of programming experience, but not much experience at all with Flash. Rosenzweig gives enough general Flash instruction to give the reader enough general Flash understanding to do this type of programming. I think the book is perfect for readers with some programming experience and perhaps less Flash experience. I am not sure it would work as well in the other direction, but the author is clear, concise and easy to follow. I think most anyone with sufficient motivation can find this book a usefull guide into basic game building with the latests versions of Flash.

I got interested in this book after discovering Gary Rosenzweig's AS3 tutorials on his Flash Game University Website. I was impressed by his ability to explain things clearly and simply. As other reviews have already stated "AS3 Game Programming University" is an excellent and highly readable book for learning AS3. In practice I find it much more helpful than Colin Moock's book "Essential ActionScript 3.0", which is a little too academic for me (although I'm glad I have it!). I'm also finding that code snippets in Gary's book are just as useful to me as those in Joey Lott's "ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook" (which covers more topics). It's helpful to me that Gary writes from a Flash authoring perspective rather than Flex. He doesn't hesitate to include timeline based assets and code when it makes sense to do so, rather than use the Flex style of generating everything in code.

The actual games are surprisingly varied and complete, but not so complex that they become difficult to understand. The code that I downloaded from the website works well. It is written in a practical concise manner with proper use of classes and other object-oriented techniques as required by AS3. However, as other reviews have noted, this book is not for advanced programmers that prefer a pure object-oriented style.

I recommend this book if you are moving from AS2 to AS3, even if you are not interested in writing games. Gary does not claim it is suitable for beginners without any programming experience but it is more suitable than Moock's "Essential ActionScript 3.0" (which does make such a claim). However it is not for web designers that don't want to learn programming and it is not for advanced programmers that appreciate Moock's AS3 book.

Lets face it. There are a lot of Actionscript game books out there. This one is good because 1) It is entertaining and readable & 2) It's the first game book I have found that works for the new actionscript 3.0.

The code itself isn't exactly as object oriented as I would like, but thats true of all the other game books out there too. It does have enough object oriented content to show some amazingly different, and simple methods for making game characters, detecting collisions, and managing objects that are possible with actionscript 3.0. I value this book as a 'how to upgrade' from 2.0 to 3.0.

The games themselves are pretty good and there is a nice variety of game styles to appeal to a wide audience. For a basic game programming book, it omits or glosses over a few important topics such as caching vector objects as bitmaps, pseudo 3-D and optimization in general.

All in all, I suggest this book if you are upgrading skills to actionscript 3.0 or want to write flash games. If you get this book, I also recommend Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move! to round out your collection.

I can't recommend this book more than if I had written it myself, Gary makes writing games in AS3 so simple to follow and what did seem like a jigsaw puzzle of programming now has had the curtain lifted and left me feeling confident that, even with my limited programming skills, I could make a game in flash that wouldn't be too bad.