If asked, I would probably say that I’ve never been an expert at anything. But the closest I’ve come is probably in programming Actionscript 3 in the Flash CS3 IDE. I’ve learned more about the language in this past year at Politico than just about anything else – ever.

Most people I’ve known who “know” Flash, prior to the release of AS3, were what I call timeline-only developers. I still feel that describes a large sum of pre-AS3 users out there today. After all, that’s how Macromedia brought us up for the most part – they’ve always had a “simple” way of coding in Flash to compliment not hand-coding everything. Remember what happened when they removed the Script Assist in Flash MX?

But, IMHO, like the general consensus to learning HTML, nothing can replace the experience from hand-coding and learning a language from scratch.

Moving from AS2 to AS3 can be a bit of a nuisance for timeline-only developers, and many haven’t even bother trying. Alot of the “simple” things they were used to using don’t work any more. Errors don’t make sense. And reading about needing to rename a class package’s folder path is perhaps meaningless when you don’t even know what a class is!

Grant Skinner writes that with great power comes great responsibility. For those who once depended on the ability to program in Flash visually only, they now have a bit of catching up to do when it comes to adding complex interactivity in AS3.

And while AS3 is quite different from AS2, the good news is its extremely powerful, scalable, and standardized. Object-Oriented programming and using design patterns is heavily influenced. Learning the language will form a basic understanding of many other programming languages, including the future Javascript 2.

What follows is a series of postings showing how I went from a generally awful AS2 actionscripter to learning AS3 my way – perhaps the same way alot of others are too!

• AS3 My Way: Intro
• AS3 My Way: Name Everything!
• AS3 My Way: Adding, Removing, and Memory Usage
• AS3 My Way: A little bit of MVC