Flex Your AS: Flex 3, Adobe Air, Flash CS3, and Actionscript 3.0 Video Tutorials

The ActionScript 3.0 Programming Short Cut gives the simplest examples of the most common tasks in Actionscript: Display programming, loading images, creating buttons, controlling depth, formatting text, etc. Because this is a “shortcuts” pdf, the pdf doesn’t overload you with explanations or examples. Instead it gives you enough to get started and then allowing you to experiment with different variations and ideas of your own. I think it’s a great jumping off point to familiarize yourself with the general workflow of Actionscript 3.0. The learning curve in Actionscript 3.0 may be a little steeper than 2.0, but once you learn how everything fits together with these examples, tackling new more difficult programming problems becomes second nature because Actionscript 3.0 is generally written as expected.
If you’re completely new to programming, you’d probably be better off finding a beginner’s Actionscript book as this doesn’t explain much of the “why” of programming, but it definitely shows the “how”. If you’re familiar with another programming language (especially one based on the ECMAScript standards), this pdf ought to teach you enough to get coding in Actionscript in no time. Also, if you’re familiar with Actionscript 2.0 and you’ve never worked with classes, this is for you. Lastly, if you’ve worked with Actionscript 2.0 and worked with classes and design patterns, there is some very important information (packages, internal, static, events, etc.) covered in the pdf, but nothing that you couldn’t quickly figure out by reading the Flex or Flash CS3 documentation or examples.