When I tried to switch to AS3 and suddenly _root and _global were just gone. And it wasn’t that they just got renamed something else, they were gone and nothing that I could find had replaced them. Needless to say I was extremely confused. Why were they gone? How am I supposed to write applications without them? Obviously other people are getting along without it so what am I missing here? (more…)

Another thing that is initially very intimidating about learning a new skill is all the terminology that people throw around and expect you to know. I’m going to break down some of these terms in a way that hopefully everyone can understand so you know what they mean and why you should care. I know these articles seem like they deal mainly with classes and not AS3 but we are building up to it. This is all fundamental stuff you’ll need to understand if you want to get far with AS3 at all so just stick with me on this one. (more…)

Alright so I’ve had some time to calm down from my initial AS3 adventures and things are going much better now. Once I finally got over the hump of trying to compare AS3 to AS2 and just thought of it as something completely different (even though it’s not completely) I’ve actually been enjoying the experience. Now that I’ve been working with it for long enough, I can tell you that I’ve joined the OOP fan-club and got a cool t-shirt that says I heart OOP.

NOTE: The point of this article is not really to teach you how to use classes, but more to help you understand what classes are and why you should use them, because to me knowing “why” and “when” was much harder then learning the “how”. If you want to know how to use them check out the help file that came with flash because it gives a lot of good examples. Also I’ll be oversimplifying what classes are and do in this article because at the moment we are just taking some baby steps hence the “AS3 for Noobs” title. (more…)