I can’t stand books and tutorials that try to cover a huge project. I usually end up spending most of my time debugging because they weren’t clear about something or another. (Or perhaps because I’m stupid and can’t follow directions, but enough about me.)

What I like are books and tutorials that cover one simple thing, like: here’s how you load XML into Flash. It shouldn’t take more than a few lines of code to do that. What I don’t need is something like, “here’s how you load XML into Flash and make an MP3 player that can randomly select songs, and display album art, blah, blah, blah”.

With that in mind one of the best resources for learning Flash are the built in help files. They give you the essentials of a method/property and a very short example of how to use it. And it’s always something that you can copy/paste the code into an empty FLA and it will work.

One of the most useful features in the Actionscript editor is the ability to right-click on a keyword and select “view help” at the bottom of the menu. It will take you straight to the Flash documentation on that keyword. Invaluable. It’s something I do many times a day.

I try to follow that advice myself here on my blog. My primary interest in putting up Flash code here on my blog is for my own personal use. You have no idea how many times I’ve been writing code and realized, “hey, I wrote some code last year that does just what I’m trying to do now. Humm, where the frak is it.” Now I’m starting to load this stuff up on my blog so that I’ll have a reference to my own code to use. If it helps others then so much the better.

It’s also good to think about large projects as lots of little projects. I know that for myself I’ve gotten projects handed to me and thought, “Whaahhhh? Man, that’s going to be hard.” But once I sit down and start thinking about the little pieces it becomes much less daunting.