...is a bitch. Seriously.
I decided a week or two ago that my next great priority should be to finally learn AS3. I must say that my learning experience so far has been less than spectacular. As with Flash itself, my learning technique involved getting a guide book and taking it from start to finish. For Flash, that technique worked like a charm. However, this same method seems considerably less effective for me with this AS3 training.
Now, I am only on the fourth chapter out of twelve (done very part-time), but I'm seeing some serious red flags here. First of all, the way AS3 is formatted pisses me off. A lot. The way my guide book is introducing me to the format pisses me off. A LOT. I can thumb through the book and see a lot of cool stuff ahead, but I know that this book will likely be inadequate for giving me the proper instruction for doing it. That REALLY pisses me off.
The problem seems to be in the innate nature of coding. It has to be done perfectly or it just doesn't work. Flash itself isn't like that. With flash, you can always find a workaround to a problem or do anything multiple ways if one particular thing isn't working for you. It's flexible like that. Script, however, is NOT flexible. Not at all. If it's not exactly right, it's exactly wrong. No wriggle room. Keep that in mind.
This book I am using does a decent job of teaching little aside tidbits and nuances of the coding environment, but fails on the real meat of the job. It offers a grossly inadequate level of comprehension. You can sit somebody down at a computer, tell them what to type, and watch the end result appear, but that does not mean that the person doing the typing actually COMPREHENDS what they are doing.
Without comprehension, you're just wasting your fucking time. It's all meaningless keystrokes.
...and that's all I've been doing for the last two chapters.
Book: "It's time to learn Technique X! Open exercise file 4. Notice how blah is blah blah blah. Got to line 4 and type blah blah blah. Copy line 4 and paste to line 5. Change blah in line 5 to blah. Export. Now that you have a solid understanding of Technique X, it is time to move on to Technique Y..."
Me: "What? Back the FUCK up, Hoss! I didn't learn a goddamn thing! I just followed instructions! Where's the comprehension?!"
With my flash lessons a few years ago, I could stop after any chapter or lesson and just play around with the program to see how things worked. I could take any part of it and do it a little differently just to see how that would change the presentation. Wanna know what that looks like in ActionScript? I looks like this - "Error 1855 - Your shit doesn't fucking work."
It certainly doesn't help that the language of AS3 seems unnecessarily convoluted. In AS2, you could go to a button and write code that basically said, "push button, go here". Nice and direct. Push button, shit happens.
What does that look like in AS3? It looks like this - "Make button push an event. Make event listener to wait for button push. Make event handler to wait for event listener to say it's done. Make event handler say 'go here'".
In other words, AS2 = Brain makes hand move.
AS3 = Mouth says hand should move. Ears hear mouth say the hand should move. Ears tell brain to move hand. Hand moves.
It's really fucking redundant. Who came up with this shit?
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I'm going to start back from the beginning tomorrow after I cool off. This crap is getting to me.
/rant
R1665
poohhardy1
Not the positive of posts but who gives a shit......
R1665
Negativity is seriously underrated.
R1665