Step by Step Learning

[DemonGibi]

Hi there..
I'm new to code stuff. I tried HTML and very very little C# 10 years ago.
I don't remember anything about them actually.(Maybe a little bit about HTML of course :) )
I want to learn ActionScript 3.0 on my own. I searched for beginner guides, tutorials but at some point they always forget explaining something and I get stuck.
Can you give me some information for how to start, learn what and go on..
Basically I need a path to follow..

I think I should learn OOP logic first of all.. Right?

Thank you in advance.

Have a good day..

[DemonGibi]

Really sorry to bother you all again..
But I'm really stuck here..

[creatify]

OOP is going to be good to know, but I'd start with a book, a beginners book. That way you'll be able to follow page-by-page tutorials. On line tutorials are great, and even just duplicating some of the tutorials here on the site will help you start to familiarize yourself with some of the language structure and event system. Make sure that your tutorials/books are ActionScript 3 (AS3) - if you mix up AS2 and AS3 tutorials, you're probably going to get confused.

Search amazon for Flash ActionScript 3 books, also, www.friendsOfEd.com should have some intro/beginner books.

Hope this helps.

[DemonGibi]

Thank you very much for your reply..

[milkmit]

I started to write a big long (very long) response the other day immediately after you posted this, but the forum ate my post and I got discouraged. :( Here's a much shorter version (which is probably better off that way, anyway):

The single biggest obstacle for me very early on was the terminology. I would read docs and blogs and APIs and so little of it actually made sense. I couldn't grasp the concepts that I was reading about simply because I didn't grasp the foundation: the terminology. I didn't understand what "properties" and "methods" were, or "arguments" and different data types, or how a "package" relates to a "class", or differences between "public" and "private", etc.

Once I took a few steps back and started to read (and re-read (and re-read again)) what all of these words meant, I was able to get to the point that I began understanding some of it.

If you can get to the point where you're fairly comfortable reading the AS3 code docs that ships with Flash (or is on Adobe's Livedocs site), I think you'll be off to a good start. That, however, will take a little bit more understanding beyond just the words, and will start to require some basic understanding of OOP, so that you'll know what they're talking about when they throw around the word "constructor" and specify how Sprite inherits from DisplayObjectContainer.

At one time the Livedocs were literally like another language to me, so it was tough to learn things just by browsing it. I couldn't understand how anyone could look at them and actually figure out "the whole picture" about a specific class or function. However, just about all of it really *is* there for you to understand how to use all the different classes and functions, from its relationship to other classes to specific usage.

Also, I'd absolutely recommend Moock's 'Essential Actionscript 3.0'. Some of it is a big dense for sure, but many of his explanations are really concise, and I found them to be better than many of the others out there. Also, once you *do* start getting the hang of things, you'll see that it's really an invaluable resource that you can continue to grow with.

Finally, the one criticism I have of that book, specifically (and this may be my own fault), is that a lot of the early examples involved more abstract classes, rather than concrete Sprite-based classes. As a user of Flash since about 1998/1999, I was 100% tied to notion that almost all code made up part of a visual asset. I couldn't quite grasp from his examples early on how a class can "be" a visual object (Sprite, MovieClip, etc). I didn't understand the relationship there, but again, it may have been from my own experience and lack of perspective. Once you get the hang of it, you'll start to see that everything is an object of some type, and some of those objects just happen to have visual representations on top of all the code.

Good luck!

[milkmit]

Also, if I wasn't clear above, I'd strongly suggest you forget about learning OOP stuff specifically at first, but instead learn some of the basic terminology. Knowing this stuff will really help you understand the concepts of OOP better, many of which can be really abstract.

Of course, a lot of the terminology also relates to OOP ("inheritance" and such), but I'm just suggesting you take baby steps and make sure you understand some basic programming terms first ("properties", "methods", etc).

[DemonGibi]

milkmit, you've just made my day..
Thank you..
I'll be focusing on the terminology first.. Then I'll move to the easy examples here on the site..
I hope I can manage this..
Thank you again.