Book Review: Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns

I  have a lot of praise for Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns, by Joey Lott and Danny Patterson.  I purchased this book when I first started learning Flex and Actionscript for the purpose of becoming more familiar with Actionscript.  I was familiar with most of the common design patterns already and wanted to see their implemetation in Actionscript.

If you’ve read and understood what the Gang-of-Four (or even HeadFirst) had to say about design patterns, you probably won’t get much more with regards to that from this book.  Most of it served mainly as an interesting read and a little reinforcement.  However, toward the end of the book there are 4 chapters that covered material not directly related to design patterns, but concepts that I have come to realize are significant to gaining an appreciation for Actionscript.

Chapter 13 is titled “Working with Events”.  This chapter really helped me to understand how events are used in Actionscript and Flex (which is different enough than how they are used in Java or Visual Basic to warrant special consideration for someone learning Actionscript).

 Chapter 14 is titled “Sending and Loading Data”.  For someone first learning Flex or Actionscript figuring out how to get data from a database is one of the most frustrating experiences, especially for those used to scripting languages whose output is HTML (like JSP or PHP).  The book covers loading text files, loading XML via URLRequest, Flash Remoting, and Web Services.  It wanted only a little bit more explanation of why it had to be so roundabout, to make it a perfect explanation.  I’ve since come to understand why, but I could have benefitted from that understanding a bit sooner.

Chapter 15 is titled “E4X (XML)”.  Like getting data from a database, how to use XML is also a source of great frustration for beginners.  Lott and Patterson give a good overview of using it, and from them I learned to treat everything as an XMLList, unless I know it’s XML.  I’ve done that and been more sane on account of it.

Chapter 16 is titled “Regular Expressions”.  This is one chapter I have yet to fully benefit from, but still an important concept as regular expressions have lots of uses both in and out of Actionscript.  I don’t have a gift for regexp like some seem to have, and I refer to this chapter frequently when I find myself in need of them.

For these 4 chapters alone, the book was worth the money.  In addition, I think someone less familiar with design patterns might also derive more benefit from the remainder of the book than I did, because it is well written and usually very clear.  One thing of less import, that I really liked about the book– only 272 pages (Deitel and Associates should take a leaf from it…)