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I need to learn Action Script 3 for a week long hackathon I'm starting tomorrow with a friend. I know a handful of languages related to AS so it won't be a problem to pick it up, though I need to do it fast.

The problem is every tutorial or book I found about AS or Flash assumes almost zero knowledge of what's programming and OOP. Are there any good resources for people who already know how to program for picking up AS quickly?

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The main thing that AS3 differs from other languages is the display model. There are Sprites, MovieClips, DisplayObjects etc. and the display tree is used for event dispatching/bubbling.

The AS3 API is always open in my browser and Essential ActionScript 3.0 from Colin Moock is the book that I consult if I have bigger problems.

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"the display tree is used for event dispatching/bubbling." This bit is not really true, events can be completed unrelated to and exist outside the display tree,.
@Tom: Yeah, you are right. Of course you can always extend the EventDispatcher. What I wanted to point out is the analogy to the DOM tree used in JavaScript.
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Actionscript in 2 minutes:

Actionscript is almost identical to Javascript, so if you are familiar with that, then there's very little more to know about the language itself. The only real differences are optional strong typing, classes and packages, which you are comfortable with and will pick up in under a minute.

The Flash player API of course is a little more substantial, but is also very simple to use, and well documented. You don't need to 'learn' any of this stuff of course, just be familiar with whats available, the class hierarchy (there is a complete diagram of this somewhere) and understand the main concepts:

a) Non blocking methods. Nearly everything is asynchronous. Use events for everything.

b) Retained graphics mode. You are not responsible for re-painting the screen. Just move Sprites around. They will be drawn on every frame in their new positions. Only the 'dirty' part of the screen will be redrawn.

c) You add sprites to a 'display list' as children of existing sprites, creating from a single root sprite, a tree of sprites. The transformations on a sprite are concatenated with those of all its ancestors, to calculate the actual transformation used - just as you would expect.

d) You will generally listen to the ENTER_FRAME event or use a timer to create code that runs every frame (or time interval) ie. game 'loop' logic goes here - except its not a loop because it will be called every frame.

e) Be aware of cacheAsBitmap for performance.

f) If you are really hardcore, be aware of Pixelbender, Alchemy and Molehill :)

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I don't think that point a) should be left without a further comment. The AS3 VM is basically single-threaded, this means that there is always exactly one method running, the execution of another is postboned until the first one finishes. And dispatching event an event is also synchronous. Only if you work with I/O (sockets etc.) there is some asynchronous-like behaviour.

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