Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Unleashed

I'm using this book for a graduate Interactive Multimedia course. Following along with each chapter's topic, you get good coverage and an easy to learn experience with Flash. Great for beginners like me!

It has been my pleasure to review many excellent books in the months that I've been reviewing for the Alaskan Apple Users Group. This month's review is no exception. David Vogeleer's Macromedia Flash Professional 8 is in every meaningful way PERFECT. Being a veteran user of Flash since Flash 4, I went into this review with a very specific demands. Before I opened book I sat down and made an obsessively long list of the topics I believed a proper Flash book should contain and braced myself should the author miss one. Refreshingly I was pleasantly surprised again and again as I read through the 28 impressive chapters chronicling the newest incarnation of creativity that is the Flash legacy. The author begins his book with a chapter covering big differences -- both in appearance and layout as well as features and possibilities -- between the newest version of Flash and it's predecessors. The chapter is concise and extremely well written and benefits seasoned and fresh users alike. Seasoned users will appreciate the briefing on the changes that they will need or want to make to convert from the way they are used to doing their Flash development. Fresh Flash users will be excited by the impressive list of new attractive features which now complement the features that originally caused them to have a desire to learn Flash in the first place. After wetting the readers appetite, the author presents a series of chapters -- similar to the ones found in countless competing books -- which explain the drawing and animation procedures of Flash. Although these chapters cover common techniques they are nonetheless well written. They contain in-depth explanations of many of not all of the options and features of certain menus windows and tabs, and also well selected screen shots that the reader can use as a base of comparison. The author also includes numerous walkthroughs that guide the user through using many of the features and techniques in the book. The author uses clear and easy to understand instructions and also includes hot-keys where applicable. Though the quality of the first seven chapters alone would probably have been sufficient to get a kind review, I was pleased that it didn't stop without mentioning ActionScript. ActionScript is the embedded programming language in Flash. With a similar syntax to JavaScript, Java, or C, ActionScript it will have a familiar feel to most programmers of other languages. It is an enormously powerful tool that allows for dynamic behavior inside of flash programs and much more. Far from simply mentioning ActionScript, the author devotes the next ten chapters to a better presentation of ActionScript than many books which are devoted solely to ActionScript do. The author provides a beautiful introduction to ActionScript and to programming including an excellent overview of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) that rivaled the introduction provided by my OOP textbook that I used at the University of Alaska for a B.S. i

My overall opinion of this book is that it is good. It covers a lot of ground and for those of you with some experience in Flash you will find this book will help you do more with the new version of Flash. The layout of this book was in my opinion done very well; there are three main sections and the ActionScript reference is not one of them nor does it take up half the book. The first section is the "Getting Started" piece which goes over the basics which you may already be familiar. This section does go into some detail about what is new in Flash 8 and how to take advantage of these new features. One item I liked was learning about drawn lines and how I can tweak the end points or the corners in my drawn boxes/rectangles. Also there was the tween editor for manipulating how I wanted an object to tween. Great stuff since I am more of the coder than the designer. The second part of the book is more familiar to me, it is on ActionScript. This material covers many of the classes and how to work with particular data types like Arrays and Strings. Also there is some Object Orientated Programming (OOP) information, just enough to whet an appetite but not that much to frustrate you to no end. There are plenty of books out there which focus on ActionScripting too much higher levels this book does a good job of getting you to a higher level without the heartache. The last part of the book really hits on the current use of Flash as a dynamic medium, talking through middleware to a server or database. This is an extremely useful skill as a developer, the more you can do with Flash to communicate outside of the Flash player the better off you are. You will find material on ASP, PHP and even a chapter on Remoting. You will not find examples here that are too extreme but it will cover the basics so you can take what you glean from the text and do more on your own. One chapter I was pleased to see was one on functions, events and debugging. These three items are important to know how to use well for creating top notch Flash media. I was even surprised to see material on integrating JSFL into your development process, very welcome material. I came to this book looking for information on the new version of Flash and to see what else I can do with it as a developer. Most everything I was looking for was here and the items I wanted to find and did not probably were too advanced for the book anyway. (No material on using Scale 9 and the material on uploading files was quite skimpy.) What I did get out of the book was enough to keep me busy for a while. If you have time over the holiday break this would be a good book to blow through so you can begin the New Year with some new skills and knowledge.