A Review of Colin Moock's "ActionScript 3.0: From the Ground Up" Tour
by Charlie Griefer, Staff Writer
This past Saturday, October 27, 2007, I spent a good portion of the day (9:00 am - 6:00 pm) at the Adobe offices in San Francisco listening to internationally renowned ActionScript expert Colin Moock discuss ActionScript 3.0.
As a ColdFusion developer who is only just starting to get his feet wet with ActionScript and Flex, I didn't really know what to expect. I don't know ActionScript, and I don't know Colin Moock? but I figured for the free admission, I'd risk it.
Now that it's all said and done, I'd say the session was easily worth twice the price.
ActionScript aside, I've been struggling to make the migration from procedural programmer to OO programmer in general, mostly in ColdFusion, since that's where I spend most of my day (and evening). While this session did cover ActionScript -- as promised, from the ground up -- it could also have been very easily billed as an introduction to Object-Oriented programming, using ActionScript code examples.
Colin started off by covering the basics: classes, methods/functions, constructor methods, variables, etc. While I'd read enough OO books and written CFCs, I enjoyed hearing the concepts explained. There's a definite difference between reading something in a book and having someone explain it to you. I personally get more out of the latter.
Over the course of the day, Colin worked on a single application, a "Virtual Pet". This was nice, as we got to see the very basic framework of an application as it's first laid out. As the day went on, code was added or modified, often to make the code more efficient or more modular/reusable. It was easy to follow along as newer or more complex features/functionality were added, as the audience was familiar with the code base. We truly got to see an entire object-oriented application written from the ground up.
Much of the code was written in Notepad (yes, Notepad). This was a good approach because it kept things simple at first. The audience was focused on the code, not on the development environment.
After a fairly significant portion of the application was written, Colin demonstrated a couple of different ways to run the code. First he ran it inside of Flash CS3, and we got a very brief overview of the tool. Then, the code was run inside of FlexBuilder (version 3 Beta), which is where the remainder of the day was spent. Even though the development effort had moved from Notepad into an IDE, the focus stayed on the code. Some of the functionality of FlexBuilder was discussed, but it was presented in the context of the current, code-related, task at hand. It would have been easy to get derailed and start discussing FlexBuilder (or Flex itself) in greater detail, so I give Colin a lot of credit for keeping the lecture on topic.
With very few exceptions, there were no questions asked during the lecture itself. We had been told early on that during dry runs of the tour, they found that they just weren't able to get through all of the subject matter if there were interruptions. However, Colin made himself available to folks during breaks, and he stayed up at the podium well after the end of the lecture fielding questions. I left about an hour after the lecture ended, and he was still at the podium answering questions.
This was not a hands-on session. I did not leave with my own "Virtual Pet" running on my laptop. I would have preferred it to be hands-on, but I have to assume that we wouldn't have covered nearly as much subject matter. We do have all of the code on paper, and I'm looking forward to typing it all in myself, and hoping that I can remember all of the reasons behind the code modifications. Of course, Colin is the author of O'Reilly's Essential ActionScript 3 book, which has been ordered and will be arriving soon, so if I find myself getting lost I'll have some pretty decent reference material.
This was the first stop on a multi-city tour, with plans to go international. Next stops are Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. Unfortunately, as of this writing, all three are full, but you can still put your name on a wait list. It doesn't cost anything to try and if you get in, that doesn't cost anything either! It's win-win. If you're looking to learn ActionScript, or just some OO in general, I'd highly recommend Colin Moock's ActionScript 3.0: From the Ground Up Tour.
Visit http://www.adobeas3tour.com/ for further details and to register.
Thanks to Adobe, O'Reilly, and Colin Moock for putting forth the effort to make this happen.
Thanks