Comments about O'Reilly Media Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 1:

With pretty much no prior programming experience and absolutely unaware of what OOP even stands for - I set out to learn ActionScript 3.0.

My first step was reading stuff on the internet. Adobe's Live Doc titled Programming ActionScript 3.0 gave me some good basic knowledge and terminology. Yet at some point I felt progress was too slow, often going deep into detail on topics that seemed to be redundant at that stage. What bothered me most was not being able to grasp the overall architecture of Object Oriented Programming. I desperately needed a birds-eye view of the whole OOP concept and how all those classes, methods, variables and events work together in what might be a more complex programming environment rather than just a dozen lines of code on my Flash Actions panel.

Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course gave me that big picture I was looking for. This probably had to do with the clever analogies, good examples, and the general structure of the course. Also, the course is given in a unique way, where there's an easy going student-instructor dialogue rather than just screen video captures with voice-over running through the material. It helped me gain a better understanding of stuff I had already learned. In addition - somewhere along part two of the course, something clicked and I think I finally began to see the logic behind it all.

While I can't exactly match Moock's enthusiasm when it comes to programming :)... possibly one of the most notable achievements of his course for me was that at times I even found myself thinking that programing is a bit appealing (?!?).... that's when I usually pressed pause and went looking for some beer in the fridge.

Bottom line: For someone starting from scratch like me, I recommend relying on several different sources for information, going back and forth between them. Many times you'll find that one compliments the other. Having said that, Colin Moock's ActionScript 3.0 Lost Weekend Course (Part 1 + Part 2) was by all means an essential contributor to my learning progress and ultimately became the springboard from which I could finally make my next significant step forward.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 1:

This first video series goes through all of the topics that you will need to fully understand ActionScript 3.0 and OOP (Object Oriented Programming). These topics are explained by well-known Flash Developers Colin Moock, James Paterson and Hoss Gifford in 21 separate videos.

The explanations given by these three guys are different than other video series (i.e. Lynda.com) because of the relaxed, easy going way they go through the topics. It makes you feel that you are right there with them as they casually explain and go through code examples. It makes it a lot more enjoyable and sometimes I felt that I wasn't there trying to learn something but just hanging out with the guys as they discuss the different aspect of ActionScripting.

The topics discussed go through the entire gambit of basic to intermediate OOP techniques such as class and object creation, methods and properties, scope of methods and properties (private, static and public), inheritance, and some fun examples used to explain all the above.

After following these great videos you should have a great understanding of ActionScript in creating the basics of classes and objects. This will be the foundation for creating reusable components in Flash.

A great buy!