When I started my first SL project, my wife grabbed a couple SL books from the library where she works. The first was Second Life For Dummies
. This may seem surprising, but I have found many of the Dummies books to be humorous and informative introductions into new topics. This title didn’t fall into that category. I learned more exploring in-world for a couple hours than reading this book. Second Life for Complete Morons would be a better title.
The second was Second Life: A Guide to Your Virtual World by Brian A. White. This is an excellent introduction to SL! The book covers all of the major topics about SL, it contains many valuable tutorials and many excellent screenshots for reference. I highly recommend it. One of the build tutorials in the book is how to make a waterfall. Ironically, on my first SL project, I was asked to make a waterfall. I grabbed the exact waterfall used in the tutorial from Brian’s land in SL and dissected it before building multiple waterfalls.
I’ve switched my development tools from Flash and Notepad++ to Flex Builder. I have tried a number of environments in search of the best environment for my style of coding. Since all of the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook examples are all based on Flex Builder, i decide to give it a try. It has some clear advantages.
- Based on Eclipse
- Cross-Platform
- Integrated AutoComplete and Help
- Excellent debugging features – This has saved me a bunch time!
Currently, I’m working with the public beta for Flex Builder 3, which looks pretty solid at this point.
I recently completed Beginning Flash Game Programming For Dummies. This is a very solid introduction to game development concepts. It’s a bit light in places for those with prior programming experience, but the content on movement, physics and math makes up for that nicely. On the downside, this is strictly a ActionScript 2 and Flash reference. I’ve decided the develop with ActionScript 3 and Flex Builder. While most of the code samples need to be reworked for AS3, the book still provide a good conceptual reference for game development topics.
I’ve also picked up ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers from O’Reilly. This is an excellent reference book. I read the first few chapters in their entirety. Now, I’m just reading sections to solve specific problems. I am eager to get my hands on Essential ActionScript 3.0, which was just recently released.
