A definite highlight was buying new snorkelling fins on the weekend (yay!) so I've been zooming around Shelly beach/Fairy Bower and terrorising all the poor Blue Gropers and cuttlefish. I've been snorkelling for years, but never pushed myself to buy fins. Not sure exactly why. Sure there's the expense of laying out the cash for something I didn't think I really needed, but when it came down to it, I think I was just freaked out by using them, or more likely finding out I couldn't use them. It seemed my worst fears were confirmed when I first jumped in the water with them. I completely struggled to get them on my feet in the water, then kept getting them tripped up on each other with my first kicks. I felt wobbly and a bit panicky, completely uncomfortable and useless with my new toys, but I persisted. All of the sudden, it just seemed to work. Suddenly the water was rushing past my head and I was covering a lot of 'ground', very quickly. I tried diving and was (almost) keeping up with the escaping fish! It was awesome! I now have the confidence to head out into sections of water I never would have before and am completely in love and all excited again about an old hobby.
The reason I've delved into detail about this is I've drawn an anaolgy between snorkelling fins and AS3. I think I've been procrastinating re starting the studying, worried it's going to be beyond me and I'm going to fail, which is just bloody ridiculous. As with all of the other code I've learned/used, and with the snorkelling fins, it's not going to feel natural at first and things won't work, but that's when I will work out how to make it work, in no time I'll be making my own interactive Flash fish etc etc.
OK, enough of the pep talk. A little less conversation, a little more action.
So I raided the uni library (while I still have borrowing privileges) and picked up a couple of books that look quite handy:
- Chris Griffith's 'Real World Flash Game Development' which looks OK, takes you through basic game programming concepts (including design sections, which I feel quite OK about skipping :-), AS3 and apparently has some game examples and code to practice with at a companion website www.flashgamebook.com
- Shupe & Rosser's 'Learning Actionscript 3.0' because it looks like it takes you from basics, and it might be handy to have to fill in more details when things I try to do don't make sense
- Webster, Yard & McSharry's 'Actionscript 3.0 with Flash and Flex', just because I like books, and it's a back up in case Shupe & Rosser aren't a good fit for me. (Actually I always go a bit overboard at libraries. I get excited and just can't help myself...)
So the plan for tonight is to get a start on Griffith's tome, if I can resist the pull of iPhoto's Faces...
