Todd Perkins takes great pains to tell you every step you need to do in order to cut and paste, every time he does it, right up to the last lesson, and every step in order to set up your curly braces, every time he uses them, right up to the last lesson, and every time you need capitalization he will tell you, every time, right up to the last lesson, but he won't tell you why you need the classes you're creating, or why you place certain code where it is, or any of dozens of other important items and concepts you bought this expensive item in order to learn. You follow along while he says mind numbing things like "space = space, hit enter, hit the tab key, then write function, space, now select all this area down to the closing curly brace and copy using the C on your keyboard and then paste using," etc. as if you bought this to learn over and over how to cut and paste.

ActionScript 3 is one of the premier languages on the web today, and learning it is a valuable asset. Todd Perkins, instructor in this video, is one of the best on [...] roster. You'd do well to purchase this course as Todd will teach you the basics of the language and by the end you should have a pretty thorough primer of how things work.

I didn't find Todd to be confusing, unlike the other reviewer here, but ActionScript is not a language that's easy to pick up. If you haven't dealt with object orientated programming this course will be somewhat challenging, but Todd still simplifies everything and boils it down to basics while giving you plenty of context about the bits and pieces that make up AS3.

I'd highly recommend this if you're looking for a basic intro course into AS3, and also would recommend picking up OReilly's Essential ActionScript 3.0 as a companion to learning this flexible language (no pun intended :P).

I bought some actionscript books, but I got this CD because I thought it would be an easy intro. But I kept having to refer to my books to figure out what was happening on the CD. Here are some examples:

The author names things in a confusing way. Sometimes he'll name an event "event" and it's hard to know whether this is just his name for this particular event, or whether you have to use the term "event" in all such cases. (If that was confusing to read, then you understand how I felt watching the CD). In other words, it's not always clear whether he's naming something on the fly with whatever name he wants, or is instead invoking a required term.

He often types code before explaining what he wants to do with it, which leads to things like, "Type this function on line 16, now go up and enter this variable on line 4, now go down to line 18 and type..." And you're just sitting there watching but not understanding what he's doing because he's not going to tell you the point of all these lines until he's finished typing them.

In general the author needs to work harder at presenting the big picture, zeroing in the details, and relating them back to the big picture. Too often, this training leaves you unclear on how to take the code he's demonstrating and apply to other situations.