Great purchase - Rated 
I bought this book off the recommendation of Lee Brimelow whose flash blog i follow. I must say i haven't been disappointed, I would put myself in the beginner/intermediate category and the book has been very useful. Full colour code is great and also the companion website offers quizzes, source code and other helpful links.
Very useful - Rated
I'm competent with AS2 and wanted to move to AS3. This book is exactly what I needed to compliment Colin Moock's, Essential ActionScript 3.0. While Moock covers everything, and does so in great detail, this book covers just the things you will generally need. It's clearly written and only goes deep enough to do the job. If you need more then go to Moock's book - as the authors occasionally suggest. The examples are well chosen and include useful source code. Unfortunately the companion website was down for a couple of weeks after I received my copy, but is up as I write. Finally, this is not a beginner's guide, as other reviewers have said. It moves briskly and assumes some programming knowledge - just what I wanted.
A great book, easy to understand. - Rated 
Gives you everything you want as a beginner, explanations of the framework and the fundamentals of programming in AS3.0 and a project (with project files available online) to work through. I found the O'Reilly version too bogged down with detail, but this was at exactly the right level. Very well written.
A disappointing little book, unfortunately - Rated 
Unfortunately I cannot agree the the enthusiasm shown for this book by other reviewers.
My biggest criticism is the very poor coverage of the syntax of each new part of ActionScript covered. The code examples are too specific and offer no help on how to use them in general.
Good books like this type tend to be either very readable, start to finish like any other good non-fiction work. Or more "manual" like, consult the index - read the section - learn what to do. This book is neither easy to read nor a good reference.
Also it is not an "independent" book. Personally I am a huge fan of Adobe's products, but nevertheless any software as complex as AS3 must have got some things wrong. A few I have since learned about are glossed over or unnecessarily defended.
It is relatively short at 350 pages.
On a positive note, it is beautifully printed in colour (and yes, colour does matter to AS3 code!).
The all time best s/w book I know of is McFarland's Dreamweaver Missing Manual and there are several excellent AfterEffects books by the Meyers. Adobe AS3 desperately needs something of that quality written about it!
A fine introduction - Rated
A very good way to learn the basic concepts behind actionscript ... I'm using it as an introduction to Flash in general and find, that after a 3 hour tutorial on the Flash interface, this book is enough to get you coding.
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