Today's ActionScript-based applications require increasingly sophisticated architectures and code. This book aids intermediate and advanced ActionScript developers in learning how to plan and build applications more effectively. You'll learn how to apply design patterns as solutions to common programming scenarios. Beyond a reference, Advanced ActionScript with Design Patterns is a practical guide complete with sample mini-applications illustrating each design pattern. Table of Contents: Part I - Successful Projects 1. How to Design Applications
2. Programming to Interfaces
Part II - Patterns 3. MVC
4. Singleton
5. Factory (Abstract Factory and Factory Method)
6. Proxy
7. Iterator
8. Composite
9. Decorator
10. Command
11. Memento
12. State
Part III - Advanced ActionScript Topics 13. Working with Events
14. Sending and Loading Data
15. E4X (XML)
16. Regular Expressions
Customer Reviews:
Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 / 5.0
Very Readable, Lots of Examples:
This is a very accessible and friendly book. I found it much more manageable than Joey Lott's Actionscript 3.0 Cookbook. Its objective is to illustrate the most useful "design patterns"--i.e., ways of approaching and outlining your project. The examples themselves can serve as reusable templates for your own projects, and that's the main point of the book.
excellent concise info on AS3:
I realize the book title (and the focus and organization) is about design patterns, but I thought it was worth adding the fact that--for me at least--it's the one book I keep coming back to for great lucent coverage of really key AS3 concepts including event dispatching (and using IEventDispatcher instead). I mean, Colin's Essential AS3 is one to turn to for definitive answers on sub-atomic (and important) details... but I still keep coming back to Danny and Joey's book because it's so direct and to the... more info
Good Introduction to Design Patterns:
If you are interested in improving your code to be more maintainable, flexible and gaining a better understanding of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) this is a good book to have. The core concepts are explained in readable language and the code examples are for the most part well-written. I did notice one criticism of another reviewer is that the book did not address Flex UI components or MXML. Flex is certainly beyond the scope of this book and there are many excellent books on Flex 2+ that will... more info
Pretty Good for a Re-hash:
This book served really well as a review to some of the GOF patterns. I already understood the patterns covered, looking at the Actionscript implementations was still somewhat helpful. I bought the book for its coverage of Actionscript events, which is really the key to creating great apps with Actionscript and Flex (WARNING: all of the examples assume you're building Flash applications, which are similar but not identical to Flex apps). And for its coverage of E4X, Actionscript 3's new XML format.... more info
