There is a reason why this book is big. Too much time is spent to explain small things. A reader can easily get lost in the details or lose any interest. ActionScript is best taught by using the object-oriented programming paradigm. Little effort is done in this direction. The programming style is not poor, but not brilliant either. It is also a dull book, in spite of the imaginative chapter titles. With so many other better books in the market, only a naive reader would actually choose this one.

i got the "Foundation of flash mx" like two months ago and i learned alot from it. Therefore i got Foundation Actionscript for flash mx. Unfortunately, this time i am totally disappointed. First of all, The contents are so unorganized. It doesn't provide the glossy of actionscript terms or something like that. The introduction is poor written. They could suddenly introduce to the reader so many new "actions" and "terms" at once, and they don't really explain them in detail. Newbies would get confused easily. The amount of tutorials are also reduced and most of them are 6-7 pages long. This book is not bad, but not a really good "introduction" book for Actionscript.

Unfortunately Sham/Ben sometimes chit-chat a little too much before coming to the core-concept: actionscript. But the book gives enough background-information about what and how to get things done. I learned a lot of making a dynamic website by following the case-study.

This is an excellent book if you want to learn action script and you have no programming background. It explains in a friendly and easy to understand way how to program in action script. It places the action script code in a real world context and builds from there. I actually enjoyed learning action script. I highly recommend this book!

I was looking at the various Flash MX books and I noticed another reviewer gave this book one star. Wow. I'm totally surprised. I found this book very helpful. It thoroughly teaches the basics of actionscript programming but more than telling you "type this here" it explains exactly why you should type this or that here or there. This book gave me the building blocks I needed to understand actionscripting in Flash MX. I'd recommend it to anyone that is serious about actionscript. If you're looking to learn to make interactive flash sites this book is a must. if you're content with something less, perhaps you should look elsewhere or consider delving deeper into the many features actionscripting can offer to your flash projects.