28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Nothing more than a promotional piece, June 24, 2010
This review is from: ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Paperback)
I was very excited about this book when I read about it here on Amazon and read others reviews, but was very sadly disappointed by the content of this book when it finally arrived. First, it's very small - much smaller than any other book worth reading on Actionscript. Second, it boils down to little more than a promotional piece for ElectroServer - the commercial game server written by the company started by the author. It lacks any clear examples, and frankly has more 'this topic is too complex to be covered in this book' statements than any other book I've ever read... ever. The examples given are disjointed - I've not seen a single actual class in the whole book - just insignificant bits and pieces of code that don't go together. Lots of examples show just a tiny fraction of the whole class and leave you either having to dig through a download of content that should have been included with the book for the amount of money they charged for this fireplace starter, or imagine it for yourself. Very poorly written, very poorly done and very disappointing to someone hoping to learn more about developing better multiplayer content - but even for a seasoned professional this book is a hard read. Spare your nickel and give it to any other author who writes books to help others learn through working examples instead of shameless self promotion of commercial products through manuscript. I find the whole thing to be very distasteful to be honest about it and will not buy another book from this author ever again.
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33 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Big on ideas, fails on examples, September 8, 2009
This review is from: ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Paperback)
I'm really motivated to add the concepts in the book to my Actionscript arsenal, so I was excited for the arrival of this book and diving in. The book is an excellent crash course in multi-player game theory and fills a much-needed place in the AS book market.
The book fails, however, when it comes to the examples. While carefully avoiding the need to own Flash or Flex to complete the exercises and thereby lowering the barrier to entry, the author requires a free 3rd-party AS editor, Flash Develop, which doesn't have a Mac client. So Mac users, beware, this oversight throws up a road block right away.
The author says the projects can be imported into Flex Builder, but I haven't gotten this to work yet. Some projects require the fl.controls class which isn't native to the Flex SDK, so there's another road block. I'm still working on this one.
I did get a few examples to run from the Flash IDE, by creating an FLA and assigning the Main.as class as its document class. This wasn't without headache: you have to go into several of the example classes and adjust paths to get the classes to import. Not for the faint of heart.
A simple solution would be to include versions of the examples in the book's downloadable files that would easily import into Flex Builder or Flash. What AS developer doesn't own one of these? Be prepared to do a lot of forensics to get the examples to work. Disappointing. (Note to PeachPit: you could still do this!)
The upside: ElectroServer, the socket server that the entire book is based on, installs easily on a Mac.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Crap., July 25, 2011
This review is from: ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds (Paperback)
This book was written wholly for the purpose of selling their server. It doesn't delve into anything helpful considering action scripts other then basic game design theory. (which some of the theory is good, most definitely NOT WORTH THE $).
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