Those of you who know me, know that I’ve been working on my book, ActionScript Animation : Making Things Move! for quite a while and have been steadily using it as an excuse to not do all kinds of other things.
Well, the book is coming down the home stretch, and I hope to have the last of it written by next weekend. Wow, does that feel good. There will still be some editing to do, but we have a pretty good jump on that, so it won’t be much. It should be off to the printer well before the end of this month, and in stores sometime in October I guess.
I was just looking over some old emails and realized that I proposed this book last November, and signed the contract for it in December. So time-wise, this was equivalent to a full term pregnancy. Seems about right. This project has been the bane of my existence. But now that it’s almost done, I’m getting really, really excited about it.
It’s going to be a great book. And I don’t say that to toot my own horn. I say that because I included all the stuff that I wish I had known when I was starting out with ActionScript. All the funky math and physics stuff that I had to scrape up a little bit at a time. This is the book that I was looking for for years and it didn’t exist, which is why I wrote it. I only hope that I did it justice.
I have to say that I learned a hell of a lot while writing it, too. When you are writing code for a book, you scrutinize it far, far more than you ever would for any other type of project. You analyze every variable name and function call, trying to make it clear and concise. Even if you’ve written the same type of function a thousand times, when you start looking that closely at it, you can’t help but gain some insight. “Why do I do it that way? Changing this around would make it so much better. Duh!” And there was a whole lot of stuff that I sort of understood well enough to make it work, but not well enough to really describe in detail. This forced me to dig in and really get what was going on.
I’ll keep updating the progress here, as we get closer to publishing.
How’s about a little taste? Like a table of contents?
See the link.
Great, can’t wait, it combines two of my favourite things, and there’s a 30% discount at the online UK store in the link you gave, sold! 🙂
could you explain in some more detail in what way it differs from Robert Penner’s book? From looking at the TOC it looks somewhat similar
While Robert’s book does cover some of the same subjects, I think you’ll find they are very different books. Without disparaging Robert in any way (he taught me a LOT back in the were-here days!), he takes a very different approach in that book, creating an AS1 vector-based class library of motion functions. While it is a great library, I think the theory behind it all may be over a lot of reader’s heads.
Rather than creating a library of functions that you can use, but maybe not understand, I wanted to explain in much more depth the hows and whys of the concepts, and make the book approachable from someone on any level. “Teach a man to fish…”
Also, although there is definitely some overlap in subjects, I think if you directly compare TOCs, you’ll see there are quite a few more specific subjects covered in Making Things Move.
Very nice!
At last you unveil on paper some of the secrets behind the experiments at bit-101.
No doubt this will the best flash scripted animation book ever. We’ll have at least as much fun reading it as you had writing it.
Once I get my hands on a copy I think I’ll jump at the Tips and Tricks part and then just slowly digest the rest of it.
One bit at a time 😀
mmmmmm
cheers,
cosmin
This is on my wishlist. I can program fine but collision and physics do my head in. I’ve got the simple things working fine and have found a few resources online that give me code so I can do the more advanced things, but I like to be able to understand the things I program. It sounds like this is what I have been waiting for and it can’t come out soon enough…
Sounds exciting – I’ll definitely be purchasing a copy.
that’s great Keith, tks a lot for your work 😉
I bought the Head First design patterns book on your recommendation, then Flash Extensibility and now this – the book I’ve been looking for … for years!
I’m sure it will be excellent, and so I’ve not hesitated to pre-order, but you’re costing me a fortune. Stop it! 😉