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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