Flash MX: Graphics, Animation, and Interactivity [With CDROM]

All in all, this is a great book. I am still going to give it 5 stars despite some errors. As other reviewers said, some of the instructions for the exercises in the book don't match up exactly with the files on the CD. For instance, one step told me to add a symbol to the stage from the library that wasn't in the library of the file I was supposed to be using. However, most of these mistakes are small and can be easily worked around. As a whole, the book is well-written, clear, and accessible for the Flash beginner. The layout is nice, and the indented hints are helpful. The training projects teach very useful techniques. The index is complete and makes the book especially easy to navigate. Some of the sections of the book are a little "too" extensive for the intermediate-advanced user, but non-beginners could just skim these sections. I highly recommend this book to those wanting to get a good grasp on Flash concepts and basic techniques that are useful in many applications. Other books may have more extensive sections on Flash web page development, but as far as "graphics, animation, & interactivity" go, this is an excellent book.

Being completely new to Flash and any kind of media development, Mohler's book was a great place to start for me. It provides numerous exercises throughout the book so that the reader can get hands-on experience while learning about Flash. Many of the exercises are quite useful and some of the techniques I was able to use immediately for the project I am working on. Each topic covered: 2D animation, 3D animation, video, sound, ActionScript gives enough of the information to the reader so one can continue exploration on their own. I will say that ActionScript treatment was a little too basic (that may be a software engineer in me speaking), so I bought two additional books about it. Also there are some errata, but think of them as trick questions to test your understanding. :-) Overall, this book is a great place for a newbie to get started with Flash.

As an instructor of Flash, I have used, since version 4, James Mohler's Flash book as a supplement to my course content. For Flash MX 2004, Mohler has kept with his consistent, user-friendly style of writing and accessible way to instruct a somewhat complicated program.

This book is jam packed full of great stuff. The illustrations are excellent and a lot of subjects are covered in detail. It goes beyond what you get in some other beginning books. It's well written and the CD has a lot of good stuff.

As someone who's pretty new to Flash, I am so happy I picked up James Mohler's book. I have learned more from this book - and I'm only part-way through - than the other books I had for MX, combined. The CD with example files has helped me immensely, and the way the book is written is definitely easy to read and easy to learn from. It seems that every time I have a question about a function or tool, if I just keep reading, the answer is on the next page!