When last we talked, we had a Button class that could be used to quickly create a button of a certain style. However, I also asked you to ignore certain aspects of the code. We’re going to start this session off with a little resolution: it’s time to explain what extends does.

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Well, hey there, hearty ActionScript Journeyman! You’ve traversed many a strange landscape so far over the last 6 months, but if all went according to plan, you emerged stronger and readier to face the next challenge. Here with the 7th installment, we’ll culminate with the topic of XML.

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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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