I have been jumping around this book for the last month or so and have found this book extremely useful. It does an excellent job at breaking up the OOP pieces into chunks that as a semi experienced programmer are very beneficial. If you have little to know OOP experience the first few sections of the book do a good job at bringing you quickly up to speed on the basics of OOP such as Encapsulation, Classes, and Abstraction. From there the book moves onto the pieces that allow you to build an OOP project. These pieces look at how best to develop and design the most commons pieces used when creating and building applications with AS3, such as how best to handle animations and effects. This was extremely helpful for me. I mostly use Adobe Flex to develop and design my applications and I was looking for a book that would help me to get a better understanding of the work flow and design patterns required to start building solid OOP applications in Flex. The section on animation and effects was extremely useful as I find myself wanting to reuse these bits of code most often.

I would highly recommend this book for any programmer who wants to get into AS3 with Flex or for a Flash developer who is looking to take their skill set to the next level with OOP programmer.

If you have a rudimentary grasp of AS2 (i.e., know how to create a basic Function) but do NOT know what 'evtObj:Event' is or why 'void' is appended after some functions. Or have limited experience in using eventhandlers like addListener...you will be frustrated by the pace of this book and the verbosity and idiosyncracies of AS3 syntax. The introduction states the 'intended audience' are "...readers who have some previous experience developing in Actionscript". That means, you should already know a thing or two about writing classes in AS2.
While the book does a fair job of explaining the theory of OOP, the concepts are not illustrated in a consistent and purposeful manner. Rather than building on one example, the authors swerve from unrelated one example to another. You may be reading about Constructors in a 'Car.as' example and then re-orientating yourself in the following paragraph on Methods because its illustrated in a 'CountingSheep.as' example. I should point out a typo on page 158. There is an extra space on this and the preceding line "this. targetMC.y++"

I read about the 60% of the book, and I can say, it really is very useful!
If you actually decide that you want to have the technical background for creating professional content on the web, you ll definitely need this one.

It uses real-world examples, explains every piece of the code, so if you also try the examples that are given, you will be able to follow along and when you finish with it, I think you ll know almost everything that is needed for actionscript oop.

I advice to everyone who would like to step further than just tweaking gotoAndStop codes on timelines, also I recommend it when you have the aspiration for being a programmer, this book goes way much further than a designer might want to go, but theres nothing wrong with that, its a technical book, a very good one.

I had read the Object-Oriented ActionScript for Flash 8 which was the predecessor to Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 and it was one of the best books I ever read. So, I cracked open this new book with high expectations and I am happy to report that I was not disappointed in the least. Both books are outstanding. If you're still working in ActionScript 2 get the first book. If you are ready to, or already have taken on ActionScript 3.0 this new book is a must have. Not that this will comes as a surprise, friendsofEd have always put out great teaching books.

The greatest values of Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 are not only in how well explained the principles of OOP are, but also in learning some great code techniques as well. Take your time with this book and really come to understand each line of code. You will find that you will learn many different code tricks that will serve to make you a far more efficient and effective coder. One of the other great things about this book is that because it focuses on ActionScript 3.0 and not specifically Flash, it also covers developing in Flex and other IDEs making the book even more versatile.

Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 also does a wonderful job of walking you through real world examples that will have actual use in future development. Many of the examples build on each other to give you a greater understanding of how each of the techniques and/or principles of OOP can work together to form a successful application.

It should be said that this is not a book for the faint of heart so if you are new to Flash, I would suggest you start with something geared toward beginners. However, at the same time, don't think you need to be an expert either. Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 does a great job of explaining things from a pretty basic level and then working you up to some pretty advanced stuff. By the time you finish this book you just may find yourself amongst the ranks of expert ActionScript developers.

Review by Jeremy Heckathorn

I've been eagerly reading as much as I can to dive into AS 3.0. I know AS 2.0 sufficiently well, but never got into the OOP side of things. After reading some design patterns books, and Essential Actionscript 3.0 (must have) I definitely understood the concepts of OOP, which was great. But then I'd sit down and try to code some kind of small app, and I felt like I knew nothing.

I like this book because it has tons and tons of code samples that I can easily read through and understand as I go, plus case studies to work on. That helps me get over that conceptual hump and actually get things done.

I really like Friends of Ed books. Anytime I feel stuck with learning a topic, it seems like I can turn to one of their books and cruise through it. I read this on the train every day - for some reason, you can just read these as you would a novel (well, sort of).

If you want to get a good grasp on OOP (and you really should if you're looking to learn AS 3.0) I would definitely pick this up as well as Essential Actionscript 3.0. You'll be good to go.

good starter book for as3 projects, although a bit flex weighted for my taste. I just want to use flash authoring tool.

I've written code in many different languages (C/C++, C#, Java, ColdFusion, PHP, JS, Ada, Perl, etc., etc.) and decided to take a peak at ActionScript. The language itself is pretty neat, but this book is rather disappointing.

The example code in this book is dissected in such a way that it makes it hard to follow along. I also STRONGLY disagree with some of the "coding practices" promoted by the authors (forgoing of proper variable scoping, not leaving comments, etc). Then again, other resources on ActionScript I've seen haven't been too hot either... I guess the "best practices" for ActionsScript aren't as stringent as in other languages :-\