Learning ActionScript 3.0 (A Beginner’s Guide) is as the name suggests aimed at newcomers to Actionscirpt. Initial impressions are good with everything printed in full colour, which means code syntax highlighting is accurately shown. There is also a useful supporting website with quizzes, downloads and links to external resources. We found support to be excellent with very easy access to the author himself.

The book is well written and organised, covering all of the major aspects of the language. This is not a project based book so you won’t find out how to create a xml menu or build a complete site from scratch. You will however, learn the fundamental concepts behind these tasks, which will stand you in better stead in the long term.

There are times when a concept is referred to before it is fully explained and unfortunately there are a number of typos, which is a real shame. On a more positive note the writing style is easy to digest; it does not have the depth of a Moock explanation, but this is not necessarily a bad thing if you are new to the discipline.

After a few pages it becomes clear that this is perhaps not really a beginners book. If you have some previous experience with AS2 (or any programming), typos aside, this is a solid text worthy of your desk. It can be considered an intermediate-to-advanced reference resource, capable of answering nearly any question you might have. Complete beginners should probably look elsewhere.

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Flash xml editor (version 2) is essentially a pretty, client friendly interface for editing xml files online. It does this quite brilliantly with raw & wysiwg code editing, image, video & sound previews and even a tool for cropping images. As well as editing existing xml files you can add new xml files, so its easy to create truly dynamic Flash web sites.

The killer feature is the simplicity of the integration. Any xml file put into the main “xml” folder becomes editable. This means you can add an easy to use cms to any xml driven site in a matter of minutes.

The only fault we found, is that a lot of the important options are hidden in right click context menu’s. This is not a major problem as full source code is provided so you can customize the interface to you liking (and branding).

Flash xml editor v2 is available to buy exclusively from Flashden. Prices start from an incredibly reasonable $40 for a single license, with big discounts available for multiple uses.

If you are still mourning the loss of your carefully crafted AS2 code library, ease the transition pain with Adobe’s excellent migration guide. The cookbook is a free pdf designed to aid AS2 developers wanting to get up to speed with AS3. Its really well put together, covering all of the pitfalls, misconceptions and benefits of the new language.