Chapter 2. ActionScript 3, XML, and E4X
If you don’t know a decent amount of ActionScript 3, Flex 4 will always be a mystery. So in this chapter, you’ll learn the basics of ActionScript 3. Once again, we’ll build a series of self-contained workshop sessions. However, to minimize context switching we’ll base them on a similar toy example. These workshop sessions will explain numerous concepts at once, since it’s hard to explain arrays without involving looping, and vice versa. Also, we’ll cover multiple concepts at once out of necessity: there are entire books devoted to learning ActionScript 3—and this is not one of those books. Instead, we’ll explore the basics of ActionScript 3 in five workshop sessions. This obviously will be a very high-level treatment, but you should absorb enough that you can use Flex 4 comfortably even if you’ve never seen ActionScript before.
If you’re an experienced Flex 3 developer who is just reading this book for the Flex 4 stuff, you can safely skip this chapter.
