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| Publisher: Friends of Ed | Publication date: 2006 | ISBN: 1590596196 | Pages: 560 |
If
there’s one thing I’ve learned as a developer, it’s this: Complexity
happens; simplicity, you have to consistently strive for. Nowhere is
this truer than in education. Our role as teachers, by definition, is
to simplify subjects so that they can be easily understood. A good
teacher dispels trepidation with anecdote, abstraction with analogy,
superstition and magic with knowledge.
Simplicity, however, is
not easily attained. In order to simplify, you must first gain an
encompassing understanding of the complex. It is a rare person who can
simultaneously exist in both the simple and complex plains of a problem
domain and communicate effectively at both levels. It is, however,
these rare people who make the best teachers.
Object-oriented
programming (OOP) is a subject that many Flash developers do not
approach due to a widespread erroneous perception of its enormous scope
and complexity. Nothing could be further from the truth.
The
core concepts behind OOP are simple enough for a primary school student
with a particularly nasty case of Hynerian flu to understand in a
single sitting.
It must be because OOP is essentially such a
simple concept that we sometimes feel the need to protect ourselves
with important-sounding words the length of major rivers in order to
explain it. Because, hey, if we said that OOP involves the interaction
of objects, each of which is an instance of a certain blueprint and has
certain traits and behaviors—well, that would just be too simple. Who’d
respect our geeky prowess then? Instead, we lock ourselves in our ivory
towers, hiding behind unscalable walls of inheritance, composition,
polymorphism, and encapsulation, and hope that the FlashKit masses will
tend to their tweens and leave us to meditate on the path to
programming nirvana.
Unfortunately, OOP is so often presented in
such pretentious prose so as to be illegible to all but a handful of
PhDs. If grandiose, self-important passages of academic rambling are
what you’re after, then you should put this book down and walk away
now. I’m sure you’ll find an 800-page hardback elsewhere to satisfy
your thirst for confusion. If, however, you are looking for a pragmatic
guide to OOP and ActionScript 2 (AS2) that is simply written and easy
to understand, you could do far worse than to look through these pages
more closely.
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