flash game

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Game Development
$49.95
This is a fantastic book. The instructions are simple and easy to follow. All the actionscripting is explained, so you know what each piece of code does. A must have for people just learning Flash gaming

ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University
$49.99
Sadly, this book was a disappointment. I am new to ActionScript, and was assured in the first chapter of the book that it would not be a problem, but it was. I do have experience with Object Oriented programming, and in those respects, it was easy to understand, and that is not the problem.

The problem with the book is the pace of delivery. I was QUICKLY overwhelmed (couldn't make it all the way through chapter two) with the book, and gave up before I could get very far. Inconsistencies with explanations, lack of explanations, overall poor delivery. Case in point can be found when describing how to hard-code curved lines. There was no explanation of what parameters the function took (all that was mentioned was "It took me a while to get this right"). Yet right after throwing that at me, I learned (thoroughly) how to hard-code squares and squares with rounded corners (thoroughly, and well done). Another example would be with event handlers. I thought I had it down upon the initial explanation, but quickly found myself far overwhelmed with so many event:* occurrences that went un-explained, and I'd never seen before. It seemed that as soon as I finally learned how to x, I'd get y and z shoved in my face and I'd have to spend another hour trying to grasp how to use y and z.

I read in a comment posted by Gary on this book that he prefers to go through piece by piece and explain everything, unfortunately I don't see it. What I did see was ten or so lines of code, but only a third of these ever got explained. He would cover the main points, but I don't ever recall reading how or why he would use the rest. It grew tiring trying to spend an hour flipping back in the pages to try and see if he ever did explain the parts he breezed through, only to never find a solid explanation.

Overall, if you have a solid grasp of ActionScript, this shouldn't be a hard book to get into, but if you are looking to start developing with ActionScript, this book is not for you, many parts will leave you sitting there questioning how he came upon what he did, and you'll find yourself playing the matching game of trying to see if you stand a chance at having your source code even similar in layout to the FLA files provided, without looking at it first.

Nintendo Wii Flash Game Creator's Guide: Design, Develop, and Share Your Games Online
$29.99
I feel a little bit scammed. The title is true, but misleading. What it really is is an adequate introduction to programming in ActionScript. Then there is a brief description of how to sign up (as in "pay")for the Internet capability of the Wii, and the reader is directed to upload the game he or she has created and to play it online using the Wii.

Since I have been programming Flash games for years, I didn't need the instruction part. And the other part has just been given to you in its entirety above. I was hoping to know how to create a game I could burn to a miniCD and play on the Wii. Then I could use that knowledge in the course I teach on game programming in Flash.

Beginning Game Programming with Flash
$29.99
I'm rarely extremely negative about a book, but this one was terrible. It's title is "Beginning Game Programming with Flash", however it does almost nothing to teach you how to program games using flash.

Besides the obvious omission of the 'game' part, the code examples often do not match up with text. There was very little editing or quality control work done to make sure the text was done right. In a case sensitive language like ActionScript you cannot allow automatic text capitalization. 'void' is not the same as 'Void'. For an experienced programmer, you might be able to sort out the places where variables don't match up because of letter case or outright misspelling, but for a beginner guide, even a simple thing like a case sensitive error can cause you to spend hours trying to figure out why the example you copied out of the book doesn't work.

Furthermore the authors didn't pay attention to the units associated with various variables. One example is the 'rotation' property of movie clips. When they demonstrate this, they provide a button to rotate a movie clip, however they seem to think the number should be in the form of a percentage like '0.30' for 30 percent, however the proper units for rotation is degrees. So the button assigned '0.30' rotation rotates the object .3 of 1 degree, ie. it is not visible. Of course the text is inconsistent and the example code doesn't match with the code they tell you to type in using their step by step instructions.

I could go on and on here listing inaccuracies, bad editing practices, and omissions. But, please just don't buy this book. Buy 'Action Script Game Programming University' instead. It might be a bit more advanced book, but at least the examples in it work and the information is accurate.