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While InsideRIA isn't about marketing, we are about letting the community know about potentially important learning resources, and face it, anything related to ActionScript that involves Colin Moock is going to be worthy of note. In three ActionScript titles over several editions, Colin's sold well over 100,000 books in the last decade, making him the best-selling author on Adobe--and Macromedia--dev technologies. There are few people in technical publishing who so thoroughly dominate their topic category.
This month, O'Reilly and Adobe Developer Library are releasing the 13+-hour-long *Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript Weekend*, a two-part video series of some heft and ambition, the outcome (or logical extension, actually) of a longer, larger process. The back story may be of interest to some. (Full disclosure: O'Reilly and Adobe worked together in producing the videos.)
Colin completed the 3.0 edition of Essential ActionScript nearly two years ago, in summer of 2007. It took him two years to write it, and two years before that to plan it out; even with all the planning, at one point, with about 300 pages completed (final page count was 900+), he stopped, reassessed, concluded his revision strategy from the ActionScript 2.0 edition of the book wasn't in the best interests of the readership, and--yes--he trashed the material. Tossed it and started over, from scratch. The changes from AS2 to AS3 were simply too dramatic and called for a primer on OOP; this new material became Part I of the three-part *Essential ActionScript 3.0*, and is an amazing and elegant introduction to OOP. The rest of the book was also a virtual rewrite; there's not much from the AS2 version of the book that made its way into the AS3 edition. So it goes.
After the book published, Adobe coaxed Colin into going on the road, underwriting a global training tour; Colin gave a day-long "ActionScript from the Ground Up" presentation in over a dozen cities. Each day's training was in two parts: The morning session was a thorough introduction to object oriented programming; the afternoon session applied those principles with real-world ActionScript 3.0 tutorials.
The structure and content of the day's learning was built around Essential ActionScript 3.0, by design; the intent was to make it as easy as possible to use the book as a follow up after spending a day in the same room with him, learning directly from him.
Adobe then suggested an interesting follow up after the tour: because a few of the full-day sessions had been video taped, could that material be developed into a video-training resource?
While the quality of the live-session video--and the lack of multi-camera set-ups and on-screen coding capture--discouraged directly porting the archival live footage to a training product, O'Reilly began brainstorming with Colin on how we could re-create the day-long sessions. We could still--and quite preferably--use his outline from the global tour as a general guide or rough script, but…. Why re-create the one-guy-in-front-of-a-crowd scenario if you don't have to?
O'Reilly general manager Dan Brodnitz, video program director Joel Fugazzotto and video producer Kirk Walter had come onto the project and things began to click.
We considered reshooting in a smaller, almost intimate classroom-type setting, with Colin--still in front of a group--integrating Q&A in his presentation more frequently, and holding one-on-one conversations with the class members as he went. Not bad, but…. That's when Colin broke the problem down to its fundamental parts: This whole deal is about Colin explaining AS3 to people. Why can't it be to one or two people and not 20 or 200? And why do we have to be in a classroom? Why can't we be in a cabin on a mountaintop somewhere?
Brilliant. A brief debate ensued about where we'd find a mountaintop, and a check of budgets said that shooting in Banff, or even Tahoe, was untenable. Dammit.
But everything else….. Sounded really cool. This could work. Why couldn't the two people be maybe Hoss Gifford and James Paterson? Here we have a couple of bright (brilliant, really, and well-known) Flash guys with emerging skills in OOP and lots of questions about ActionScript 3.0; motivated to learn and bound to be asking some extremely insightful questions that can help anyone master their understanding of AS3.
We decided to shoot in the Bay Area, since that's where Joel, Kirk and Dan were, plus that's where Adobe is and--this was such great news--Adobe engineers Jim Corbett and Chris Nuuja were willing to come on location and give interviews during the shoot. The location: a guest house on a deserted stretch of beach near Inverness, California. Three days, three flash experts, two Adobe engineers and one film crew.
A bit of early feedback confirms one of the things we'd hoped to achieve: Non-entry-level developers will find real value in the series as well. The viewer emailed Colin, saying "I consider myself a decent AS3 programmer, having moved from AS2. While the intended audience is an entry skill set, I found several hidden advanced nuggets of information in your presentations. That kept me hooked."
A few blip.tv promos videos are here:
--General trailer http://oreillypromos.blip.tv/file/1879462/
--Hoss Gifford http://oreillypromos.blip.tv/file/1923703/
--James Paterson http://oreillypromos.blip.tv/file/1907415/
Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 1: Introduction to Object Oriented Programming
Running time: 6 hours, 11 minutes
Available now on streaming video; DVD release is in April
Running time: 7 hours, 35 minutes
Available now on streaming video; DVD release is in April
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Very Cool :)
I actually met Jim Corbett at MAX for a talk on SEO & Flash, he snubbed me for working at a 'firm' :-) seeing the way they code/work - makes life academically fun again.
Will People Learn OOP and AS3 from Video?
That's an odd question to me because I think people like Lee Brimelow has shown people do learn coding from video. The real question is whether people will pay for it.
The video does look interesting but I don't think I'll be spending $130 each for two courses covering the topics in a book I already own.
That much money, $260 for the full video, is a bit much to ask. If it was in the $50 to $100 range I might consider the purchase personally since I doubt I could justify requesting it at the office even at a lower price.
well although the videos don't do much to convey any of the "teaching". I for one am glad that Adobe is making some effort to educate people on as3. as someone with fairly extensive as2 experience i have found the switch to require a ton of dedication and hours of sweating through the littlest things. i can't fathom how anyone would pick this stuff up from square one. i have about 4 as3 books and all of them totally ditch the beginner after chapter 3 going on and on about design patterns and complex stuff.
there really needs to be a better way to make actionscript fun to learn again.
c
ps. great blog post. very informative
well although the videos don't do much to convey any of the "teaching". I for one am glad that Adobe is making some effort to educate people on as3. as someone with fairly extensive as2 experience i have found the switch to require a ton of dedication and hours of sweating through the littlest things. i can't fathom how anyone would pick this stuff up from square one. i have about 4 as3 books and all of them totally ditch the beginner after chapter 3 going on and on about design patterns and complex stuff.
there really needs to be a better way to make actionscript fun to learn again.
c
ps. great blog post. very informative
This looks great, even for an advanced developer. The conversations alone got me wanting to check out more!
seems sorta pricy, but it should be eaisily absorbed into the budget of one project. i want them, and will get them when said project arrives this year.
For those of you who can't shell out $260 bones, remember that this video course lives on SafariBooks.com along with thousands of other book titles and videos. That's a very practical and viable option for the majority of folks out there imo.