Flash 8: The Missing Manual

This is my first Missing Manual book that I've read through. I'm sure that humor is something difficult to perform in a step by step text. Still, as the text droned on and on with too limited a vocabulary, I found myself fighting harder to make it through this book. The lady author did make a joke here and there, in fact I think about every 70 pages there was a joke or two until later in the book. Somewhere in the 300s, the lady changed her vocabulary from simple explanations to simple explanations with some American slang in between. The sentence with 'muff' was my personal favorite in the book. That sentence flowed so natural, I felt as if she was talking to me in a conversation. After that, it went somewhat downhill with slang she didn't seem well adapted to, and later getting better toward the end of the book. Other than lack of vocabulary, she took nearly a hundred solid pages and used 'she' instead of 'he' in her sentences. English wise, she 'muffed' up. A better choice would have been 'individual' or 'person' or if she so desired 'dude' or 'dudette'. In that case, the slang would have been obvious, and loose rules would be applied. As far as teaching, the book does provide the necessary information to use Flash to produce an animation, basic web page, or an animated GIF. There are a few notable shortcuts given, such as #Static, which were worth the last hundred pages you made it through to read them. Actionscript is very lightly covered. It seemed that she was tired of this book somewhere in the middle of the 300s, which is understandable, as I was tired of the book at least thirty pages before it was obvious the author was. Covering Publishing, Publishing Profiles, and Exporting was well done excluding her PICT explanation where she didn't explain dpi(dots per inch) or postscript, which was definitely not any of the prior options of gif, jpg, or png which she compared the export PICT option menu to. The book also makes many references to programming, but seems bound by the presentation and audience of the book to achieve that depth. This book would have been better if the times when the author found herself bored, she consulted a thesaurus to vary the vocabulary. Even though I've spoken of some annoyances, the missing manual book does it's job. Flash 8 basics to intermediate usage was taught. The step by step instructions were simple and easy to understand. There is enough explaining to understand and learn what is going on. While the book does fail to achieve and maintain an 'interesting' status, the book succeeds in it's objective to be a simply understandable guide to Flash 8.

Are you a Webmaster who has given up in frustration because of distracting and annoying elements on your sites? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Emily A VanderVeer, has done an outstanding job of writing a book that explains all of the tools and shows you step-by-step how to create animations from scratch; as well as, why you want to do each step--in English, not programmer-ese. VanderVeer, begins by guiding you through the creation of your very first Flash animation, from the first glimmer of an idea to drawing images, animating those images, and testing your work. Then, the author shows you how to manipulate your drawings by rotating, skewing, stacking, and aligning them; add color and special effects, and multimedia files such as audio and video chips; slash file size by turning bits and pieces of your drawings into special elements called symbols; and, create composite drawings using layers. Next, she shows you how to add ActionScript actions to frames to create automatic effects and to buttons to create audience-controlled effects. Finally, she focuses on testing, debugging, and optimizing your animation. This most excellent book will show you tips and shortcuts for making Flash easier to work with; as well as, making your animations as audience-friendly as possible. More importantly, this book is designed for readers of every skill level except the super-advanced-programmer.

The book dissapoint me at the begining because i consider the contents to be too soft, like totally for beginners, I thought "oh no, I just bought another "flash for dummies" sort of book, where you get told how to use tool by tool, but not how to put everything together, the keys of how to actually create a professional flash website. But I totally start to enjoy the book from episode 10 where the author explains how to control your animation with actionscript. It happen to be very clear and useful to me.So, yes, i would definetly recommend this book to everyone who wants to start to get into flash. Not for Medium-Expert users anyway. However, the quality of the illustrations that are used as examples are of really poor quality. So if you are looking fordward see pretty graphics not purchase this book. And it's in black and white too.

As per usual, the Missing Manual line hits another solid ball with Flash 8: The Missing Manual, but this time it's not out of the park. Packing 14 chapters and nearly 450 pages with solid material and great writing like you would expect from this line, I cannot do anything but give five stars for the writing and instruction. Unfortunately, when one opens the book and finds that there isn't even a SINGLE color page in the entire text, this is big mistake. If this was a book that covered something like Word or Excel (except for any graphs that might be used) this might not be such a bad thing, but for something like Flash where the entire premise is flashy graphics, smooth animations and crisp, clean vector graphics, to not have any color at all is a mistake. If you want to use Flash you cannot go wrong with this book, but this major decision faux paux I consider a huge fumble and it's the only thing stopping me from giving my usual Missing Manual 5 star rating. Hopefully this can be improved in the 2nd edition or with Flash 9. **** HIGHLY RECOMMENDED