Since I have a feeling of imminent doom at work, I need to get back into what happening in the online world again. So much has happened in the past 4 years that I just havn’t had the time to even explore: AJAX, Javascript becomming “DOM Scripting”, CSS2, Flex, Microformats, etc. I’ve bought a few Friends of Ed books on those topics and hope that I’ll find time to read them before the year is up.
Right now, I’ve settled on trying to learn Flex 2 and Actionscript 3. I bought Charles Brown’s book on Flex 2 and AS3, and plan on working through it over the next few weeks. I don’t think that I can come up with a “business use” for either of these, so it’ll probably be very slow going. If our client would upgrade to Flash player 9,they just now upgraded to 8, then the situation would be better – I feel like I’m really falling behind not learning AS3 right now. But if I can’t use it at work, I don’t have much free time at home to learn it.
I feel like I could pick up AJAX pretty easily, since I’ve got a lot of experience with JS and CSS in the past, I’ll try to pick that up in the fall.