Introduction to Teaching Myself Flash

Dear Blogosphere. My name is Henry and this is my first blog. I'm using this blog to document my learning process of Adobe Flash. I figure I might as well hit 2 birds with one stone: 1) learn how to use a blogging software and figure out what all the hype is about that, and 2) teach myself Adobe Flash which will be useful for web development and as a hobby for making games for my daughter.

I have a background in programming. I'm a web developer and I'm familiar with PHP, MySql and recently Ruby on Rails. Flash looks easy enough, it has all the familiar keywords and statements similar to C++ or Java for looping and conditions etc. For the most part the books that I get regarding Flash spend too much time on such obvious things (like what is a string) and not enough time on the aspects that are unique to Flash (like how do I change the background stage color). I'll be documenting all the unfamiliar 'gotchas' that I come across in my learning process and posting them here for my own benefit and yours.

In this long process I'll be working through some examples that I find in books and on the web, and making notes about what I learn. In particular I'm starting out with a book called "Flash Math Creativity". I find this book very appealing because there are many examples of making stunning graphics with actionscript programming and I hope to eventually study all of them. This may be a daunting task because the book was written in 2002 for actionscript 1 and we are now on actionscript 3 which is far more strict and object oriented. As a learning exercise I'll be modifying their example code to update it for actionscript 3.

Thanks for visiting.

Henry