Reviews for Advanced Actionscript 3 with Design Patterns

1. Great for AS3 and great for Design Patterns

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, February 12th, 2008

   This book contains many very well written examples of Design Patterns. It contains many of the lesser known patterns and would be a great book to both the new and experienced AS3 developer.
   
   I would recommend this book to all levels of AS3 developers.

2. Excellent, whatever you use Actionscript for.

   Rated 5 out of 5 stars, November 12th, 2007

   I found this to be an excellent book on design patterns for Actionscripters. If you could follow the pattern examples in Essential Actionscript 2.0 then this is the logical place to go next. Despite being relatively slim, it is densely written with no waffle or padding. It covers an enormous amount of material, and the authors' practical experience at Actionscript coding on real projects shines through. The way the book selects the most useful patterns for Actionscript projects, and doesn't cover irrelevant patterns such as Observer is great. The sections on Unit Testing, Events, E4X, Regular Expressions and loading external data are an unexpected bonus. The book is broad enough to help anyone working with Actionscript, from Flex RIA programmers to people writing Flash games.
   
   For a book with a cover price of 32GBP, there are a few quibbles that nearly caused me to knock off a star. There are minor problems with some of the program listings given in the book (e.g. page 50). The website that accompanies the book is very poor, and it contains no Errata or corrected listings for the major Proximity example. There are also minor typographical errors with the program listings - for instance minus sign is sometimes rendered as an em dash and sometimes as a minus sign within the same listing (e.g. page 61). Simply getting someone to follow the book through and enter the listings would have solved all of these problems. I also wasn't too impressed with their explanation of Facade or Adapter.
   
   However, despite this I think this is one of the best books on Actionscript I have read, and it has proved as valuable to me in my work as those by Colin Moock.