[perfecto]

I am experienced in most ADOBE products and web development. But flash is one area I have not learned yet. I know this is highly individual, but how long do you think it would take to learn flash in a decent way?

Any special approach you would recommend in learning? Are Lynda.com courses good?
trying to get a sense of how long it will take to get decent results and which way to go in terms of what material to learn from.

thanks in advance!

[web-itec]

perfecto, on 27 April 2011 - 08:22 PM, said:

I am experienced in most ADOBE products and web development. But flash is one area I have not learned yet. I know this is highly individual, but how long do you think it would take to learn flash in a decent way?

Any special approach you would recommend in learning? Are Lynda.com courses good?
trying to get a sense of how long it will take to get decent results and which way to go in terms of what material to learn from.

thanks in advance!

Hello, welcome to the forum, in my personal opinion, flash is easy, now im talking 2 years ago, as there is now flash actionscript 3 whereas when i started i learnt flash actionscript 2 which in all honesty is pretty much the same as AS3, just certain things are named in different ways so instead of me being able to put

myvariable = "stringhere"; //In actionscript 2

i think its got to be

var String:myvariable = "stringhere"; //In actionscript 3

note i said i think as ive not learnt AS3 properly but im sure thats what ive seen, anyway as you can see theres not much difference, when i learnt AS2 it took me less than a year to learn it fully easily (whilst still being in school, not full time learning it), flash is a great tool for animated websites, gaming etc,

So in answer to your question, no flash isnt hard to learn, it wont take long to learn, id say to get a good understanding of it about a month tops, a good knowledge of the scripting about 6months, i dont know about any courses, but id have thought they would be un-necessary as i learnt without a course only being at a young age aswel, theres loads and loads of tutorials on flash

When i was learning i used http://www.tutoriali...torials/Flash/1 which has got plenty of tutorials to get you started and get you on your way, plenty of actionscript tutorials i just looked then and its got 1249 actionscripting tutorials when i started learning it there was barely 200 actionscripting tutorials, goodluck

[Galagargh]

Would depend on what you wanted to achieve. But overall if you are fimiliar with the adobe interface it is quite quick and easy to learn. fun too!

I learnt flash purely to procastinate, just making simple animations etc, this was when i was 14 and it was easy to pick up even then, then again i was just making animations, nothing techincal.

If you wanted to make quick advertisements like you see in the corner of youtube sometimes, id say a week tops. You wouldent need to necessarily have a "knowledge" of the code you are using either, you would just need a grasp of how to animate and use buttons/scenes

i used these tutorials when i was younger which are free but are aimed towards animators. They still give you a firm understanding of the basics of flash and only take around 5 minutes each, did i mention they're free?
superflashbros(dot)net/category/tutorials/

If you really wish to excel in flash and create stuff like games/websites, then it could take months. I recommend this lynda tutorial. just take out the (dot)s and replace them.

www(dot)lynda(dot)com/tutorial/67685?srchtrk=index%3A1%0Alinktypeid%3A2%0Aq%3Aactionscript%203%0Apage%3A1%0As%3Arelevance%0Asa%3Atrue%0Aproducttypeid%3A2

thats really the only way your going to get the true potential out of flash. But dont be put off, lynda tutorials take you step by step and this particular tutorial treats you as if you have not yet learnt any object orientated programming language.


Hope you meet that deadline ;P

[FizixRichard]

web-itec, on 28 April 2011 - 09:13 AM, said:

Hello, welcome to the forum, in my personal opinion, flash is easy, now im talking 2 years ago, as there is now flash actionscript 3 whereas when i started i learnt flash actionscript 2 which in all honesty is pretty much the same as AS3, just certain things are named in different ways so instead of me being able to put

myvariable = "stringhere"; //In actionscript 2

i think its got to be

var String:myvariable = "stringhere"; //In actionscript 3

note i said i think as ive not learnt AS3 properly but im sure thats what ive seen, anyway as you can see theres not much difference, when i learnt AS2 it took me less than a year to learn it fully easily (whilst still being in school, not full time learning it), flash is a great tool for animated websites, gaming etc,

So in answer to your question, no flash isnt hard to learn, it wont take long to learn, id say to get a good understanding of it about a month tops, a good knowledge of the scripting about 6months, i dont know about any courses, but id have thought they would be un-necessary as i learnt without a course only being at a young age aswel, theres loads and loads of tutorials on flash

When i was learning i used http://www.tutoriali...torials/Flash/1 which has got plenty of tutorials to get you started and get you on your way, plenty of actionscript tutorials i just looked then and its got 1249 actionscripting tutorials when i started learning it there was barely 200 actionscripting tutorials, goodluck

ActionScript 3 may have similar syntax to ActionScript 2, but that's missing the point. ActionScript 3 changes your approach and is tailored towards OOP, moving away from timeline based programming and moving away from adding code to components.


For example, in ActionScript 3 you cannot directly apply code to objects on the stage, it promotes class use, event listeners and dispatchers and promotes using external classes over code in the fla itself. The point of AS3 was largely to tighten things up so that developers stop using bad practices and start developing real applications with it properly.


It may sound pedantic but your variable declaration example misses whats actually happening; its not "just named differently", it's working in a totally different way.


In your AS2 example you variable has no type; its loose and can contain any kind of data, the AS3 example is typed and therefore the type of data you store and how you handle it is different. It's strict.

Also your AS3 example is not AS3, you can do that in AS2 as well; the difference is that in AS3 you have to type variables; in AS2 you didn't.

But strict typing is more than just how you declare them, it alters how you are programming and how you handle data in your code.



Learning the interface for Flash and getting a basic grasp won't take that long, getting good at it really depends on your programming experience and with what languages. If you don't know a class from a function then your AS3 journey will likely be quite a long one if you want to be any good.

To learn it to a significant degree, I've been using it professionally since Flash 4 or 5 (now we are on Flash 11) and I am still learning things about it.

This post has been edited by FizixRichard: 13 May 2011 - 02:20 PM

[smartkid]

Check out VTC flash Video courses.. i did that.. they are nice and easy..

[webworks]

I would recommend Total Training.. regarding video tutorials. The guy is a professional.