I definitely recommend picking up the Cookbook, and Design Patterns to round out AS3 subject matter. If I remember correctly Moock’s EA3 didn’t even touch RegExp, remoting, and something else I was looking for at the time.

Oh well, it’s still a must-have, and we’ll never quite be weaned of the Flash Help Menu entirely = ]

All I can say is that I do now is have an index/loader document (index.fla) with a class (Index.as) and the loaded document (main.fla) with a class (Main.as) that does the basic website funcionality. Which, funny enough, is a depart on how I did things on most of my AS2 projects (where I used single fla files). I assumed it’d just be easier to load the second SWF instead of having to do tricks to manage attachable movieclips, sounds and class loading on different frames.

Josh, Omine: my biggest problem was with migration. The documentation exists, but some things are barely mentioned and leave a lot to be desired, on my experience.

When porting my knowledge, I’ve been mainly using the migration table:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/migration.html

And then the livedocs:
http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/2/langref/

To cite a few examples. Once I wanted to port some of my code that created sounds on AS2 to AS3. The attachSound() method is removed, and the solution supplied by the migration table is “Create an instance of a Sound subclass that is associated with sound data; for example, by using new Sound() instead”.

The problem is that it’s a no-solution; it only makes sense if you already know the answer, otherwise it’s just a puzzle. You visit the online documentation for Sound() and it doesn’t mention how to attach a sound from the library. I tried a lot of different things with no luck; I had to search the web for a solution. Luckily, I found similar complains on the flashcoders archive, and the solution was there. It turns out the new method – instantiating from the new sound subclass directly – is much better, but i had to go out of the official documentation to find it because the existing documentation was cryptic at best.

Other example that just happened a couple of days ago with me is that I needed to use attachBitmap() to add a new bitmap to the stage. Of course that method was removed, so I visited the migration page to see the solution, and it says “In ActionScript 3.0, use addChild() to add child display objects”. Gee, obvious enough, but then I use addChild(bitmapData) and just got a weird error. Looking at it now, the documentation for BitmapData does provide an example that does it (using a new Bitmap() instance), but the example is so convoluted I searched somewhere else before parsing through it first; so again, I found the answer somewhere else. In that case, smaller, more straightforward examples would be better.

All in all, I have nothing against the new version of the language. I like it a lot; both changes I mentioned are for the better and the API is a lot more natural. I wouldn’t recommend anyone taking AS2 over AS3 now. But I do feel the documentation misses a lot, specially when migrating. These were just two examples, but there are too many answers that are left unanswered or that keep me dumbfounded, and the reason why I think a guidance from scratch (with a book like Moock’s EAS3) is a better option. And I’m usually the guy that hates any kind of guidance and just assume that documentation is more than what anyone should need.

So I use online and local (CS3) docs when searching for the answers, and when that fail, google. However, it was too often that I found the answer lying somewhere else than Adobe’s own material, even for simple stuff like the sound attaching.

The asdoc-ish format is great. My personal frustration is with how much the content lacks from a ‘migrator’ point of view, not with the form it has.

I’m looking forward to use AS3 in my upcoming projects. Many essential things have changed from AS2, but at least now they seem to work more naturally, without workarounds like Delegate, etc.

About OOP, I hope AS3 will debunk the myth that OOP is appropriate for RIAs, but not practical for design or advertisement websites.