My principal reference, so far, has been the "Actionscipt 2.0 Migration" section which is buried in Flash's help, under "Actionscript 3.0 Reference / Appendices." I recently picked up the book shown here, and found it to be useful. Now I'm finally getting around to porting many of the movies in my Flash Bestiary to AS3. Although this book covers some of the same material, as in the help, it is organized quite differently, and includes copious sample code. There is a lot of coverage of the differences in object declarations, argument passing, much of which I found useful.

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I like Moock's Actionscript books, but like his AS2 book, this is not nearly as in-depth as Moock's older book "Actionscript for Flash MX: The Definitive Guide". Like the title says, this covers the "essentials". I'm hoping that Moock eventually gets around to writing a "Definitive Guide" for AS3 (although it would be quite a long tome, I imagine).

One of the wonderful things about Flash is that it is a great first language to learn for high school kids, hobbyists and new programmers. I've always felt that game programming is the best way to learn programming because it is so much fun, and makes the programmer much more motivated. Much more so than the dry and math-centric first programming examples found in many first-language textbooks. If I were new to programming, this is exactly the kind of book I would want to use. If you are familiar to programming, but unfamiliar with Flash and with Game programming in particular, this is also a good book.

Since 2006, this is the book I recommend to my students who are new to Actionscript. Once you begin to get the hang of it, I would recommend supplimenting it with a Colin Moock book (see below).

click to view description at amazon

Note: If you are specifically interested in the Actionscript 2.0 feature-set, then consider also reading Essential Actionscript 2.0, by the same author. However, this newer book is more of a companion volume, covering the new object-oriented techniques introduced with Actionscript 2.0. It is not an introductory book and is definitely not intended to replace The Definitive Guide.

Of course, you can get most of this information by using the actionscript dictionary on the help menu, but I'm one of those people that likes the feel of dog-eared paper in my hands. Also, the book doesn't cover up my work area the way the help-windows do.

Also, if you are already an expert programmer in 2 or 3 other languages, such as C, Perl and Javascript, then this book (which is much cheaper than it's Daddy, The Definitive Guide), is probably all you need to learn Actionscript. I myself learned Actionscript by reading this book, and by writing a lot of experimental code, a small part of which is available on this website.

Penner's code should be singled out for it's elegance - he is a natural born programmer.

Although I did not buy this book, I have a copy on my O'Reilly Safari bookshelf which I reference all the time. Don't know what O'Reilly Safari is? Read on....