I just started to study Actionscripting from book that goes into the basics of AS2.0. Nothing indepth and more of an overview. My question is with the latest CS3 utilizing AS3.0, since i'm unaware, is it worthwhile to study AS2.0 or is the whole markup of AS3.0 radically different and i shouldn't study 2.0? How much of 2.0 carries over into 3.0 and if you know which areas are they? Thanks!
Hi, AS3 is very different, sure there are similarities but AS3 is more object oriented and developpers who know java or C# have a better start with the new language. AS3 is also much faster, more accurately the flash virtual machine that executes AS3 is much faster... Most of the changes affected the MovieClip Class and the newly introduced display list is also one of the major and deeper changes. You can read at adobe the cheat sheet to translate from AS2 to AS3. In my opinion, AS2 is easier and is the best choice for small projects that are not CPU intensive and thus doesn't require a faster virtual machine. AS3 is much more secure when it comes to loading content, you might want to have a look at the new byteArray class as well and see the possibilities... Regards.
Thanks Wassim for the details. I thought i had heard of some big changes. I'm looking at basic behaviors and the main AS for movie clips. I am guessing that these are very basic and should carry over into AS3 but i don't know...looking at this. http://www.actionscriptcheatsheet.com/downloads/as3cs_migration.pdf Might be better not to get into AS2 altogether.