AS3 Tutorials Novice

Draft

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Stage 1 : (Absolute) Novice

I don't know for you. I tend to learn best by doing. What gets me through complex learning is the desire to realize things. Of course, it is very important to take the time to understand complex notions thoroughly. However if you are too much worried about understanding every single aspect of the programming language before writing your first line of code, chances are high that you will give up before reaching that point. If you reach that point, the risk is that your head will be so full of unfamiliar concepts that you will completely unsure about what you should be doing next, what option to take.

Something that I find to work for me is to take a tutorial or book about the language, read it through without trying to understand everything. I do my best to understand the introductory paragraph of each chapter and to browse through the code trying to grasp the gist of how things get done. Then I go back to the beginning and start coding very simple examples. I make sure that I understand them well. I try to produce as many simple variants as I can of these simple examples. I add a new element, then a new one, etc. Once I become familiar enough with the very basic I try to come up with an idea of a little program that I could write that would make use of many of these basic elements. I write the program... I don't give up before I have finished writing it. Even if it takes me 2 or 3 days, I persevere. Once I am okay with writing an original program, I try and come up of ideas of various types of games or activities that I would like to become able to realize. I evaluate which one I can write successfully with what I already know. I evaluate what new concepts I need to master in order to write that program and the likelihood that I can get to learn these concepts in a relatively short amount of time. I go for the most realistic options.

In this view, what we will do next is

1. provide a simple program that is guaranteed to work (copy/paste/compile/run).
2. invite you to try and write variants
3. introduce a small number of examples that each introduce a specific technique

The priority here is to develop your familiarity with actionscript code. You are not expected to be able to write a program from scratch, only to give a try at modifying a few values or slightly reorganizing a few lines of code.

We will attempt to give you an understanding of how things work at the next stage (Beginner).

Make sure you first run through this section, on Compiling a program. You may want to print that page and keep it at hand as you will need to repeat the process for each example given in these tutorials.

Let's go exploring!

• AS3 simple examples: introduce a small number of examples that each introduce a specific technique

1. AS3 example Drawing graphics
2. AS3 example Message Box, mixing graphics and text on the screen
3. AS3 example Button
4. AS3 example Positioning
5. AS3 example Drag and Drop
6. AS3 example Keyboard control