Using this manual

The chapters in this manual are organized into the following logical groups to help you better find related areas of ActionScript documentation:

This manual also contains numerous sample files that demonstrate application programming concepts for important or commonly used classes. Sample files are packaged in ways to make them easier to load and use with Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional and may include wrapper files. However, the core sample code is pure ActionScript 3.0 that you can use in whichever development environment you prefer.

ActionScript 3.0 can be written and compiled a number of ways, including:

• Using the Adobe Flex Builder 3 development environment

• Using any text editor and a command-line compiler, such as the one provided with Flex Builder 3

• Using the Adobe® Flash® CS4 Professional authoring tool

For more information about ActionScript development environments, see Introduction to ActionScript 3.0

To understand the code samples in this manual, you don’t need to have prior experience using integrated development environments for ActionScript, such as Flex Builder or the Flash authoring tool. You will, however, want to refer to the documentation for those tools to learn how to use them to write and compile ActionScript 3.0 code. For more information, see Accessing ActionScript documentation.