Sap and Flash and Other Things

Hi all,

Sometimes you have to make the effort. In my case Colin Moock was coming to Australia. He is world renown in the Actionscript world for his excellent books and a way of explaining things in a practical way. The seminar was in Sydney, and I live in Melbourne. About an hours flight, but for me about 1:30 drive to the airport, and then the travel at the other end. It was a long day in the end beginning at 4-00am and back home around 10-30pm.

His book “Essential Actionscript 3.0″ is an excellent book, and his one day training session covered the general flow of the “Virtual Zoo” example in the book. In many ways the seminar glued the sections together as he worked through the thought processes of building an application. What I liked was the way he started with the basics, then gradually applied the layers to make the application. For example he gradually explained why you need say private access controls in some cases, while others were public. It seemed to me that when building the application you need a good idea of the structure of the classes you will need, and gradually build up the detail and links as you go. His approach was very much a case of “Well lets get this basic functionality working, then ..and only then add in the next layer of detail.”

The seminar is around 9 hours, and it was probably at around 7.5 to 8 hours that we actually saw the application working on the screen. Basically up to that point it was developing the code, testing, modifying and when happy it hung together he added the graphic elements at the end.

It was well worth the effort, and an excellent way to get a good overview of Actionscript 3.