A few weeks back, a bunch of us signed up to attend the Chicago portion of Colin Moock's Actionscript 3.0: From the Ground Up tour. This morning, I woke up bright and early (along with Chris and Masha), and caught a bus over to Navy Pier for an all-day, 9-hour lecture on AS3 from the guy who literally wrote the book on Actionscript: Colin Moock.

Before things got started, I ran around to the front to get a quick view of the crowd. Lots of folks in the room, with an interesting range of ages and backgrounds.

A view of pretty much all we did, all day: looking at a text document as Colin explained the code he was writing. A lot of the talk centered on Object-Oriented programming approaches. And while I've done a smidgen of it, it was really good to hear someone (who I consider an expert) provide their behind-the-scenes thoughts, line-by-line.

In looking back, I feel like I was actually comfortable and familiar with about 85% of the material covered - which made me feel remarkably good. I'm mostly familiar with classes and basic OOP principles. But when mutiple classes start talking to one another... that's where I lose hold, and things start to get all fuzzy.

For almost the entire lecture, I had a pretty decent handle on what was going on. Which felt good. I'm excited at the new changes offered up in AS 3.0, as well as checking out FlexBuilder for AS coding. Where I previously felt a bit daunted by programming in AS 2.0, I feel a bit better about 3.0 after having heard Colin Moock give this overview.

Colin, describing what he calls a programmer "mindfuck" moment. He was a pretty fun speaker, throwing out the occasional joke and rewarding/punishing people with free book coupons (he gave one to a guy who was falling asleep in the front row). Good stuff.

Towards the end of the day, he was looking around for a Coke but discovered all the vending machines only kicked out Pepsi products. Someone from the audience had a can of Coke they brought with, and offered it up to him; in exchange, he gave them a free book coupon.

Our day-long exercise was to create a virtual pet (think Tamaguchi). Some of the slides (like the one above) were just too funny, and I had to take a picture. Especially since I could re-post it here, out of context.

All in all, a pretty intense (the word "brutal" was used by many) day. Lots of sitting in an uncomfortable chair, staring at code and listening to someone talk about code. But still exciting, believe it or not. I'm tired and sore, but I have a spark again to try to code using a newer, non AS1 approach.

While the lecture was marketed as "beginner to intermediate," the talk was (in my opinion) very much intermediate-plus in terms of its scope. It took a lot of things for granted, and even being familiar with a lot of the basic concepts... I found myself struggling, at a few points, to keep up. Still though, glad I attended, and a good day spent learning.

On our way out, Chris and I were joking that it might have been easier, all in all, to have just gone in to work instead. :)