Customer Reviews

Director® 7 and Lingo Bible

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

When I began reading this book, I had been a user of Director for about three years. While my experience producing multimedia CD-ROMs using Director had been good, it always took forever to work out the bugs in my Lingo code. I knew there was a better way to write the Lingo scripts using object-oriented programming techniques, but I didn't understand the concepts or how to do it very well. I was also reluctant to change from my tried-and-true style of programming that had worked for me since beginning with Director 3.

I'd read other books about Director and tried a few things to push my personal envelope, without a lot of success. But as I began to read in this book about how to use OOP structures in behaviors, it was like a light turned on. This book made it very understandable. I kept (figuratively) slapping my forehead and saying "of course!" as I tried the examples in the chapters. I can't remember the last time I've become so excited about learning something new as I have with this book. It has really empowered me to become a better multimedia developer. With the new understanding this book gave me, I'm more confident that I can build any interface feature I want into my Director projects. Before, when a client would ask for some feature, I would be hesitant to agree or promise it. Now I don't have to "kludge" things together...and I can implement it fast and with high reliability so that works consistently in cross-platform projects. My turn-around time on projects is also a lot faster now.

I turned to this book after making the mistake of buying Lingo Sorcery to learn object-oriented programming in Director. It was a great relief to find (at last) a coherent introduction to OOP in Lingo, with lots of examples in the text and code on the CD. The rest of the book is terrific, too.

I'm a graphic designer and I always felt like reading a book about Lingo programming like this! It's straightforward and full of practical examples. If you want to improve your jobs and reach another level as a good professional, I think you must acquire this book! Congratulations!!

This book is really user friendly with lots of examples and illistraions and at no point was I ever lost, never! With all the examples that are available one learns quickly and before you know it you have reached the end of the book. To all the authors I would like to say with confidence that you have put a great book together, including every little detail and yet keeping it simple enough for one to understand. I cannot wait for Director 8 and Lingo Bible as I will be the first one in the cue to purchase the book.

This is the most well rounded book on Director available. When used in combination with Bruce Epstein's Nutshell series you have 80% of the information required for advanced Director programming (DIRECT-L and your own effort will get you the final 20%). A beautifully organized easy to follow book you can use as both a reference and instructional guide. The sections on object-oriented lingo are reason alone to buy the book. Individuals who have difficulty with Peter Small's Lingo Sorcery will find the OOP style refreshing (then go back to Sorcery for the true "gems" it contains).

If you want to expand your Director skill set - get this book.

Like this book needs another 5-star review. It's just that I e-mailed the authors with a fairly advanced (for me) question and that Nyquist character sent me an excellent answer right away. So I thought it would be nice. I didn't end up eating it though. Yet.

The format and tone of this book are geared for beginners, but it contains solid shortcuts and clean Lingo code that will benefit intermediate and advanced.

The Lingo section is clearly written and presents concepts in a well-planned sequence, but the type size and leading are so large that it's difficult to find specific information and there's relatively little actual content on each page. The authors provide powerful custom handlers but they don't differentiate them from built-in Lingo. Related Lingo appears on tables in appropriate sections, but it's usually necessary to get back into the reading stream in order to find the right code or syntax. The index references topics and subtopics, but no Lingo directly.

The book promotes poor design with its main tutorial project, an amateurish sci-fi scene with a badly designed user interface and 3D graphics that look dated already. If you're think about this for a course in professional interactive design, consider others.

Unlike other reviewers, I find that D7 Demystified is ultimately easier to use. It's easier to compartmentalize than D7 & Lingo Bible, and it's an excellent reference. This book does present better programming concepts, but its linear approach drastically reduces its usefulness.

How can a book on Director be more of a chore to understand than Director itself? In my Unversity program the class was instructed to buy this book as a required text. Not a single person in the class liked this book, or even got close to understanding its confusing and cryptic method for categorizing information. It became a running joke that if anyone attempted to look up a feature of Director 7 by name not only would it not be listed in the index, but thorough expeditions into the pages would invariably be fruitless. The only thing keeping the daily desire to hurl this text out the window or at the professor was the guilt for spending 50 bucks on it. Needless to say, we were spoiled with the lucidity and readability of Deke McClellend's Photoshop Bible and were led astray here. Avoid this book! The manual that came with the program for FREE was far superior.

I started with Director 7 Demystified and found that after reading that book I didn't know what I was doing. So I picked this one up, and it covers many many details that the Demystified book does not. The example files that you work with are commercial quality (those Swifty examples in Demystified were some of the ugliest files I've ever seen). In summary, I want to congratulate the authors on putting this outstanding book together; the amount of effort the authors put into this book is obvious from the first chapter on. Thanks for making our lives a little easier.

As all other books start off, you'll start with a project and more elements are slowly added in as you go thru each chapter. Of course there's the usual side notes, explaining certain tips, concepts and more advanced features. It starts off with the basic controls, but doesn't get carried off by explaining every single one, which can be good or bad in a way.

The book goes with idea that if you know some of the controls, you can figure out the rest. After dealing with various multimedia features of Director, it finally reaches the Lingo language, but rather than explain the basic semantics, its starts quickly with functions and procedures which hopefully can be figured out later.

If being proficient in Director is what you aim to be, then this book is definitely a good buy. But if you're more into average projects with decent animations, and yet can't be bothered reading too much or knowing too much too early, then you'll be better off with the Visual Quickstart book. I found that after covering more than half the book and finally reaching the Lingo chapters, I stopped coz I felt I didn't need to know all that unless I was doing hardcore projects. Besides, its also cheaper than other books which are just as THICK.