Well before Ajax and Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation hit the scene, Macromedia offered the first method for building web pages with the responsiveness and functionality of desktop programs with its Flash-based Rich Internet Applications . Now, new owner Adobe is taking Flash and its powerful capabilities beyond the Web and making it a full-fledged development environment. The key to using this new IDE is ActionScript 3.0, the latest version of the Flash programming language. ActionScript 3.0 is a powerful object-oriented language, whose code executes up to 10 times faster than code from earlier versions, so even if you're familiar with ActionScript 2.0, tackling this upgrade will be a challenge. Our new Cookbook offers ready-made solutions that enable ActionScript developers of all levels to work with the new version right away. Rather than focus on theory, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook concentrates on the practical application of ActionScript, with more than 300 solutions you can use to solve a wide range of common coding dilemmas. You'll find recipes that show you how to: detect the user's Flash Player version or their operating system; build custom classes; format dates and currency types; work with strings; build user interface components; work with audio and video; make remote procedure calls using Flash Remoting and web services; load, send, and search XML data; and much, much more...Each code recipe presents the problem, solution, and discussion of how you can use it in other ways or personalize it for your own needs, and why it works. You can quickly locate the recipe that most closely matches your situation and get the solution without reading the whole book to understand the underlying code. Solutions progress from short recipes for small problems to more complex scripts for thornier riddles, and the discussions offer a deeper analysis for resolving similar issues in the future, along with possible design choices and ramifications. You'll even learn how to link modular ActionScript pieces together to create rock-solid solutions for Flex 2 and Flash applications. When you're not sure how ActionScript 3.0 works or how to approach a specific programming dilemma, you can simply pick up the book, flip to the relevant recipe(s), and quickly find the solution you're looking for.