A good place to start and where I want to end up!

[r2designs]

First allow me to introduce myself as i am new to these forums!

My name is Robert Raiskums, I am 21 years old and I am beginning to look into my future. I have always loved working with computers! I started with HTML, working into JAVA, Visual Basic and then moving more towards the design aspect with photoshop, illustrator etc.

Now for my questions: My uncle gave me the idea the flash is beginning to boom more then ever in the marketing world and that his printing company often outsources a lot of their flash work. He mentioned more towards the scripting part of flash so question 1:

What is flash scripting and where is a good place to begin?

Question 2: What should my action path be to work my way up? (ie: learn languge A first then language B etc)

Question 3: Do I need anything other then Adobe Flash? (I have the suite)

Question 4: Some things I was also interested in knowing (only if I should be learning at this point) is like remoting vs. simple XML and should I know how to set up and run databases (what program to use, I learned a bit with Access already) etc..

I want to do this right and learn from the bottom up - I know tutorials are a good way to learn but I was hoping to pick up a few books to learn the proper way. Any suggestions would be great and any help is much, much appreciated.

I just wanted to mention I know the basics of flash animation aswell please don't be scared to uses high tech terms, I know how to use a search engine and I am already very smart when it comes to computers and computer terms.

Basically I am looking for a guide :)

Thanks again for taking the time to help,
Robb

[RIT_FlashKid]

Hi Robb,
I think that your definitely in the right place if you are wanting to start working with flash and actionscript. I have been coding for not too long maybe a year or so and still consider myself to be a newb to as3. I started working and doing animations within the timeline before learning to write actionscript in keyframes then moving to write separate .as files (this will come later). Depending on what you want to do with the software I would suggest starting very basic. If you want to do animations most people I have talked to started with the tutorial of making a ball bounce using a motion tween (on the timeline) then moved from that into making a ball bounce using keyframe actionscript. As far as good books to help you begin, I have three books that sit on my desk at all times those are:
Visual Quickpro Guide: Flash CS3 Professional Advanced
Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner's Guide
ActionScript 3 CookBook
If you ask any flash coder three books they use all the time odds are they will all give you different answers. I started with the Visual Quickpro Guide since I found it to be the most basic to just start off with and has timeline info in it.
As far as software goes, if you want to go the way of XML you can write it in an basic text editor however I find writing PHP and XML in Dreamweaver to be the best for me.
Hope some of this info helps you along your way.
-BC

[r2designs]

Thanks for the response - I like the idea of starting with the ball tut. since I know how to make actions with a motion tween but not yet with scripting. I will look into those books for sure - your advice has been a great help.

I don't know if I want to go the way of XML, isn't that where remoting comes in? Maybe learn both? And with XML isn't that just a "recipe" type thing where you explain how a program or website works?

All the help here is greatly appreciated.

Robb