Book by Rich Shupe + Zevan Rosser, O'Reilly - $40US
Learning ActionScript 3 by Rich Shupe and Zevan Rosser Jan 2008,363 pages from O'Reilly - $40US
Flash is currently involved in a huge battle with Microsoft Silverlight, Sun's Java, and Apple for being the rich media player of choice on the desktop and for that matter all GUI driven devices.
Adobe took a big gamble recently in making improvements to its very popular and ubiquitous Flash Player (98% of all desktop browsers worldwide have the Flash Player as a plugin). First, Adobe more than doubled-the size of the Flash Player from 1.4Mb to 3.3MB in converting it to a faster virtual machine similar to Sun's JVM. Second, Adobe in converting from ActionScript 2 to ActionScript 3 brought in more security and scalability but at the cost of a more rigid class-based and strongly-typed syntax. The result is that Flash developers familiar with ActionScript 1 and 2 will have substantial learning curves in getting up to speed in Action
Hence the attraction of Learning ActionScript 3.
As noted, Flash has certainly become one of the most popular rich media plugins in the industry but meanwhile its scripting has undergone some majors changes as a result. And the book Learning ActionScript 3 certainly does help designers and developers to see the big picture on those changes. However, as a Beginners Guide I would expect more than 20 pages devoted to the syntax of the language. If you are not familiar with ActionScript or Programming - the guidance here is minimalist just the barebones of the syntax and semantics of a newly enriched language. Detailed explanations await the examples and continue right to the end of the book.
This approach can have advantages - readers don't get bogged down in programming details and the authors quickly pick up such example scripts and topics as Frame + Timer events and a Dynamic Navigation Bar. However, some colleagues whom I lent this book to got lost quickly. Also the others did not take the time to show the details on how exactly to run the examples. That is the downside. Users new to ActionScript may want to go to The ActionScript 3 Bible to get the ActionScript 1 or 2 update. Those looking for more of the OO theory behind ActionScript 3 and what benefits that brings to scalability and development may want to checkout Colin Moock's Essential ActionScript 3.
But if you do know ActionScript - then this book is a real pleasure. Why - because the topics and examples are just the sort of things that designers are going to want to do in ActionScript - things like Programmatic Tweening, Full Screen Video, Particle Systems, and Timeline Animation Recreations. The examples are very enlightening and point out some of the key strengths and uses of programmatic Flash in conjunction with drawn and designed Flash. Maintaining this Design versus Development balance is key to getting the most out of Flash plus ActionScript 3. This book gets you well started. That is why I would recommend changing the subtitle name from Beginner's Guide to Designers Guide.
Also more good books are made better by an accompanying website - this is one of those. Just check out Learningactionscript3.com and see what I mean. Meantime if they change the title of the book and add more design versus programming trade-offs this book could easily be a 5 star candidate .