In this sixth installment of AS3 101, we’ll be studying topics related to the “Display List”, Flash’s rendering system. With a solid understanding of how to program the Display List, a whole world of dynamic possibilities open up. You will no longer be tied to static display structure that you create on the timeline in the IDE, but you can create and destroy MovieClips (and more) with code.

There is much to know, so we’d better get started. Our ultimate goal is a wall of clickable images (go and check out the demo). While simple, it introduces many Display List programming techniques.

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Welcome back to AS3 101, the fifth edition! At this point, you should be comfortable with the concepts of variables, functions, conditionals (branching), and Arrays. Not only should you be comfortable with the concepts, but you should also be fluent in how ActionScript 3 implements these concepts.

For this fifth episode, we’ll be adding to that catalog of skills the various looping structures found in AS3. You’ll find some dependencies on the information learned in AS3 101 Part 4, on Arrays, so if you’ve skipped that one or need a refresher, please review that tutorial before continuing with this one.

For our final project, we’ll combine loops and arrays, to make a simple shoot-em-up game.

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In this installment of AS3 101, we’ll spend the entire tutorial exploring a single type of data available to most programming languages: the Array.

Arrays are ways to keep lists of values. Arrays are useful to keep an arbitrary number of related items grouped together, and can represent complex data structures though nesting. In ActionScript, Arrays have quite a bit of flexibility and functionality, as we’ll see. After the usual abstract introduction, we’ll apply what we’ve learned (whilst also learning some more along the way) by building a rather simple puzzle game.

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In our third installment of AS3 101, we meet the brains of the operation. All applications need to have at least a little logic built in, so that is what we’re talking about: branching. We’ll meet the if statement, the switch statement and a little something called the lookup table (or hash map).

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This is part 2 of the introduction to ActionScript 3.0 series. We’ll be talking about functions. Just like last time, when we focused on variables, we’ll be primarily targeting the neophyte programmer, who has little to no experience with functions. However, even if you’re relatively comfortable with functions, you may want to skim through this tutorial if certain aspects of them – like datatypes and default values – aren’t quite sitting well with you.

We’ll spend the first half of the tutorial covering things at a more theoretical level, then put some of those ideas to use in the second half. We’ll be building a very simple piece with a series of buttons which swap out the content on another part of the page. There’ll be a few functions in use to accomplish this, primarily one that handles the setting of the content. Make yourself comfortable, go and take a look at the demo, then get stuck into the tut..

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Back in March, when Flashtuts+ first appeared, we had a huge amount of requests for specific subjects and tutorials. A staggering 25% of those requests were for a series of tutorials to take beginners through the fundamentals of ActionScript. In true Envato style, we’ve listened to our audience; today sees the launch of a string of tutorials to lead you through ActionScript 3.0 from the ground up.

Whether you’re looking at ActionScript for the first time, or simply want to refresh a few things in your seasoned mind, these comprehensive tutorials aim to help you. Read on to learn more about the author and, of course, the first in the series: Variables..

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