Need a book to learn Actionscript 3

burntheladle

I've decided I want to try and learn how to use actionscript. I'm a digital arts student, focusing on animation, and I'm reasonably familiar with flash, so I figure it would be a wise investment.

Only problem is I need to learn it out of a book, and I have no idea where to start. My local bookstores have a lousy range of flash books, and they're all for actionscript 2 anyway. I've resigned myself to amazon (which I don't really like because I can't browse the book and see if it clicks with me, but oh well).

Any reccomendations? I have pretty much no programming experience, and there's such a huge range of foundation and "for dummies" and all sorts out there...

Thanks.

Jasconius

Essential Actionscript 3.0 by Colin Moock is an excellent primer.

Then once you're comfortable with the language and you want to start doing awesome stuff I would recommend checking out the Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook, by a different author. It has plenty of neat tutorials in it (though the code in it, in my opinion, is badly written, it still points you in the right direction).

Both are published by O'Reilly.

I would stay away from the Design Patterns book, or at least thumb through it before you buy it. I've had it for about 8 months now and haven't had a need for it once.

Then you just need to bookmark the AS3 LiveDocs and worship it as the one true God. ActionScript 3 has massive libraries and it's pretty likely that whatever you need to do, there is already a Class out there that can help you do it.