ActionScript 3 is a language predominantly used for flash projects, because of this you will need one of the flash authoring environments such as flash, flex, flash builder or catalyst. All of these environments can be quite expensive to buy and although there are few free and cheap alternatives, none that I know of outside of the adobe family are very good at all (someone, please prove me wrong).
ActionScript 3 is the latest version of the language and so you will need to target your project to the flash player 9 or above. Remember you cannot interchange scripting versions so you will need to remember all the 3rd party classes you use, if any – are ActionScript 3 Classes.
It is also considered best practice to create all of you scripts as external scripts, making it much easier when managing complex projects, but in the interest of accessibility we will use internal project scripting organised onto ONE frame within your project at this stage.
It is so important to make sure your script remains on one frame of your timeline. Actionscript 1 was a simple “timeline control” language for animation , for this reason, Flash allowed you to place script on different frames to tell it to ‘stop’, ‘start’ or ‘goto’ another frame. ActionScript 3 (and ActionScript 2) is not this type of language and developers coding in this old scripting style are going to run into major problems when their project get more complex. Beginners learning in this way will learn bad habits and never quite understand naming conventions because of this. Finally, programs written in this way will always have an upper ceiling to complexity because this method is so limiting. Always keep your script on a separate layer, title it “actions” and place your script on the first frame of this layer.
In the next ActionScript 3 101, we will look at writing your first script.
