If you want painless method for learning OOP AS this is the book for you. The only omission I have found is that the author does not delve deeper into the logic of programming in the OOP, especially where it is very necessary in order to understand a topic or a solution.

I am sorry , reading the reviews I thought this would be great , so I bought it.I must say editing is horrible , no online help(wrote 5 mails not even 1 answer),lot of mistake in book.The code style changes often so the beginner is bit lost.Then Bhangal suddenly introduces heavy coding without explaining much often (Math.random()*5) +3 or Math.round()...he didn't explain the parameters of random no. selection in AS.
only thing I can say you need to do this book more than once to get hang of AS if u r really a total beginner like me.
If looking a fast way don't get into it if u r a total beginner

Mr. Bhangal's wonderful teaching style and excellent writing make this a truly easy and painless experience.

Explained in plain english how to actually *do something* with action script.

Great examples and analogies really drive the concepts home. I think its a big help that Mr. Bhangal is a designer and can speak to a person on a visual level.

And, I had a question, e-mailed Mr. Bhangal, and he got right back to me.

I am currently reading Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004 and am also very impressed. The Friends of Ed is a great tool for designers looking to learn multimedia and web software.

This book was done well for *not* programmers. I'm a relatively seasoned (6+ yrs) Java & C programmer--I found it incredibly slow.
Bhangal spends a ton of time convincing the reader that things such as "event handling" and "classes" are good. Anyone who has written a GUI for the Mac, Windows, X or Java will find a majority of the content incredibly tedious.
The last chapter on "Advanced Actionscript" starts to touch on the areas I find most valuable--specifically scope, sub-classing, the differences between AS 1.0 & 2.0. But that was really it.
Again, for non-programmers or designers (for whom I'm assuming this was designed) I think this might be a great book. Bhangal goes to great lengths to explain the "why's" of programming concepts. For programmers, I'd suggest Macromedia Press's "Flash MX Professionsl 2004 Application Development" by Jeanette Stallons.

Overall I found this book helpful in taking me to the next level of ActionScript. The main project of the book from beginning to end is the building of a website called Futuremedia. This web page makes use of many cool tricks the author takes you through step-by-step with pretty good explanations. To teach the reader how to implement these techniques, several smaller coding projects are used to introduce programming concepts that will be later used in the more complex Futuremedia project. Each chapter has several of these smaller examples which is very fortunate. About halfway through the book, due probably to some sloppy editing, the Futuremedia project gets derailed by missing steps and references to earlier explanations which never made it into the text. Being that I didn't find the Futuremedia project all that interesting, I eventually abandoned working on the book's main project and concentrated on the smaller projects contained in each chapter. These are all complete.
The author's writing style is easy to follow and he tries to explain concepts so non-programmers can grasp them, which is the main reason I stuck with it to the last chapter.
If you are looking to move from the simple coding of buttons, movie clips and basic timeline animation, this book still has some good information to offer.