Currently the Rich Media Institute is offering over 9 hours of free training. The online lessons comprises of video tutorials with practical examples, providing you with a comprehensive overview of ActionScript 3. You will have to act quick as the offer expires on February 15th. Once signed up, you have 365 days to complete the course.

One of the first things you will notice when you start using Actionscript 3 is Movieclip’s no longer automatically invoke the hand cursor once you set a mouse event. Fortunately the solution is simple:

yourBtn.buttonMode=true;
yourBtn.useHandCursor=true;

Now if you just have a textfield inside your Movieclip you are probably wondering why that blasted hand cursor is still hiding from you. To solve this add:

yourBtn.mouseChildren=false;

Setting mouseChildern to false ignores the mouse clicks of all the children inside the Movieclip. What’s super handy about this property is you no longer need to included hidden hotspots as the whole text area becomes the hotspot (not just the text)

One of the biggest improvements AS3 has over AS2 is the way xml is now handled. The old node syntax has been replaced with the more intuitive ECMAScript (E4X). This short tutorial introduces you to key concepts of working with xml in AS3.