If you’re an experienced Flash or Flex developer ready to tackle sophisticated programming techniques with ActionScript 3.0, this hands-on introduction to design patterns takes you step by step through the process. You learn about various types of design patterns and construct small abstract examples before trying your hand at building full-fledged working applications outlined in the book.

Well before Ajax and Windows Presentation Foundation, Macromedia Flash provided the first method for building “rich” web pages. Now, Adobe is making Flash a full-fledged development environment, and learning ActionScript 3.0 is key. That’s a challenge for even the most experienced Flash developer. This Cookbook offers more than 300 solutions to solve a wide range of coding dilemmas, so you can learn to work with the new version right away.

ActionScript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide is the most complete, up-to-date reference available for the latest version of ActionScript. Author Colin Moock has added hundreds of new code examples to show new Flash MX techniques in the real world. The book’s language reference alone has nearly doubled from the first edition, with more than 250 new classes, objects, methods, and properties. You’ll find exhaustive coverage of dozens of undocumented, under-documented, and mis-documented features.

Advanced ActionScript 3 is a fresh look and new approach to utilizing valuable, structural techniques and methods that are commonly used in the field of rich interactive application development. With each method broken down into different strategized explanations, you’ll find the approach most suitable for you. Whether it is an example you can utilize as-is, or one you can start with and develop further, you will have a glossary of definitions and organizational concepts at your fingertips.

ActionScript 3 is a full-fledged programming language, with complete object-oriented capabilities, event handling, sound and video support, drawing capabilities, support for regular expressions, and much more.

Starling is an ActionScript 3 2D framework developed on top of the Stage3D APIs (available on desktop in Flash Player 11 and Adobe AIR 3). Starling is mainly designed for game development, but could be used for many other use cases. Starling makes it possible to write fast GPU accelerated applications without having to touch the low-level Stage3D APIs.