In general it’s a pretty good book, for what it covers, it’s really well explained.  I found it’s a good book to read fast; you just go over the pages quickly and look at the examples  and it will give you ideas about what you can do in ActionScript 3 and how you should do it. For the most part it is targeted to a wide audience, novice to advanced programmers. That’s what I found not so useful about it. About 50% of the book is on really basic topics like: how to trace a message, how to add element to an array, etc. Mostly everything before Chapter 6 is really trivial. There is also a whole chapters about Date and Time. I found strange that in the Programmatic Animation chapter, they wouldn’t even speak about the tweening and easing classes.

The really good thing about this book is the chapter about the display list. It is something new to flash and they really take the time to explain it well.

All in all, it’s a good book; I don’t think that you can’t live without it, but it’s definitely nice to have around when you program.