Customer Reviews

Director 6 Demystified

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(11)

 

 

I just can't put it in a "maximum of 1,000 words". And I'm not going to spend more time than I already did with this book. All I can say is that, basically, it sucks, that's it. Totally outdated tutorials that will work only if you own an old Mac, lack of detalied information on Lingo. I really expected much more from this book. Just don't buy it, trust me. You can get much more from your money.

As a Multimedia Design major, our teacher used this book as our textbook. All I can say is, if you want to learn Director and Lingo (and I mean learn it WELL), use another book. Although there are several step-by-step exercises to help tutor you in learning Director, I found that in some of the exercises they will tell you to do a step, but they do not describe it in DETAIL. The exercises are vague, and with the examples given, it does not tell you how or why they did that step. I've discussed this book with my fellow students and found that the majority of them agreed with me. I know they came out with a Director 7 Demystified book (by the same author), and although I have not seen it, if it is written the way this book (D6D), then you are just wasting your money.

I just bought USING DIRECTOR 7 (which was recommended to me by my new professor) as well as the DIRECTOR 7 BIBLE. I LOVE both of these books! USING DIRECTOR 7 is much more descriptive and easy to understand, and the DIRECTOR 7 BIBLE is great for quick and easy referencing. If you are going to learn Director, I suggest you buy both of these books. :oD

I was looking for a D6 book that would take me to a next level on advanced lingo programming and other topics in D6 that I haven't discovered. I consider I'm an intermediate D6 user. I know how to put together a relatively creative CD-ROM project. I admit there's a time that I have to sacrifice some of my creativity due to lack of lingo skills. So I bought this book. I was NOT going to use it as a tutorial, but a desktop quick reference for problem solving tutor. However, the book did not deliver as it promised. It lacks so much information on how to do things. It keeps telling that you can do this and that, but doesn't explain how the object-oriented programming is carried out in those examples in the book. It jumps from one example to the other regardless what questions and thoughts users might have. It assumes the readers can always follow the author. I was very disappointed. Don't buy this book, and go look for other books like Lingo in a nutshell. I haven't read the Director Demystified 7 (the newest version), but I wouldn't want to waste my money on it.

People seem to either give this book five stars or one, and I'm strongly in the first camp. Not only have I just about worn out my copy, I recommend it to others. It's clearly written and the writer connects smoothly one topic to the next. Seems like some people are angry that not all the movies on the CD are native Director 6 movies, but he didn't write them all. They're samples of others work. I didn't have an earlier edition so I don't care how much it was like those: this one really works for me. I AM curious about no 6.5 update. Is there going to be a Director 7 Demystified?

... To make it short I will always read Amazon reviews prior to purchasing a book again. Further, Amazon you now have ALL my business. But in regards to the book itself. The book is poorly written and the tutorial programs that are on the CD are very buggy. They were designed for Director 4 and if one runs them under Director 6 using Windows 95 or NT it will cause a system crash, (blue screen) I contacted the authors of the various sample programs: Barry Seidman (Barry Seidman Portfolio), Pat Knoff(Oingo Boingo)and both confirm that they wrote these programs for version 4 on a Mac for the Mac. As you know when you create a .dir file for the Mac it will behave very oddly in a Windows environment, and this goes beyond the issues of palettes. Yet, the book clearly says that it is for Mac or Windows. What does this tell you?

All emails to the author: jroberts@panmedia.com have been ignored... In addition, although the book has been out for some time, the web site that is supposed to have updates to the CD ROM to correct the extreme bugs is still not available; see:http://www.demystified.com/CD-ROM.html so is the much awaited answers to questions: http://www.demystified.com/answers.html

I would buy from Amazon: The Director 6 Book : The Ultimate Handbook for Multimedia Profession END

As a multimedia professional, I was happy to have a thorough explanation of changes to Director 6, where I could get an overall review of the tips and tricks. However, (and you knew there would be one) the book does little to take the reader into a full developmental cycle with the program. If I was looking to develop on this book alone, I would be quick to discover that the Lingo needed is not there, and the ShockWave section was only a handful of pages. With the need to develop, I would pass for another book (if I had not already purchased it) to allow a full creative understanding. Too much attention was paid to the pieces, and very little of the whole of multimedia development in this tremendous program.

I think people who gave the low grade usually own the author's previous books. My suggestion is to buy it if you didn't have his previous work.

This book, as either a tutorial or as a quick reference is rather poorly written. Using the index is often an annoying experience because many helpful commands are barely mentioned outside the end appendices. This book is simply a mediocre beginner's tutorial and a Do It Yourself reference guide - after reading it you'll be able to get around the program but you'll have no idea how to script efficiently or other memory strategies which are oftentimes easy to learn and use but ignored in this book. Much of the book is an inefficient tutorial, such as the "Profiles:" selections and although the CD contains some useful things most of the sample movies are disturbingly poor. The book's cost is not justified.

What really gets to me about this book is that the author, Jason Roberts, follows the same arrogant path of so many other writers for cross platform software. Specifically, if they are writing a guide for a software that is Windows centric they ignore the Mac users who will be using that book. If on the other hand, and as is this case, the author wrote Director Demsytified (for Director 6.0 which is a native Mac program) but did not take the time to offer adequate help for the Window user nor did he or anyone else tet the examples on a Windows machine, certainly not an NT machine. Here's just a brief set of examples: In ALL of the diagrams of screen captures in this book, not one in it's 1075 pages, is there a single Window95/NT template. Yes, there are substitute commands but, heck, since this book is a slight makeover from Director Demsytified 5, one would think that Jason Roberts would catch on after many complaints and correct this oversight. Furthermore, this book, sadly to say, is little more than a cut-n-paste update from ver 5. In fact the same quirky examples, that WILL CRASH YOUR NT 4.0 system if you run them, (especially Kumite, Npix, Ruby, Vpinkiosk and the Seidman movie file (.dir) in the Movie folder ) Mr. Roberts did not take the time or spend the effort to update some of the old boring examples, such as the Seidman.dir or the Tsystem.dir which are over 4 years old and were composed on Director 4.0. I mean really! For the cost of this book and the plug it got from Bud Colligan, one would expect a trifle more effort In fact, it just goes o show you how Macromedia feels about their customers if they can recommend a book that is a hatchet job. On a side note Macromedia still produces a product that one has to buy 2 copies of off, one for the Mac and one for Windows in order to produce a cross platform projector. Also, never buy their academic version, as it does not allow you to create a final product for distribution, another rip off at over $300 a pop. Unfortunately, the book is used by several schools to teach Director. Which maybe somewhat OK since these schools use Macs for teaching. But I can tell you that many of the students also have PCs at home and they are really disappointed with this book. In my advanced Director class taught Dave Ackerman here at Univ. of ColoDenver, (yes one needs to keep upadated with Director) we all are upset with this book. But if you're not a student and like the rest of us wish to develop for the Windows market (afterall Bill Gate's Windows owns 90% of the market-Macs are down to 5%) then you will be wasting your money on this book because it does not truly support the WinTel platform. My bottom line advice is: Avoid this book if you plan on learning Director on a PC or even if you wish to test your movie on a Windows machine. This book is a bad bet. Besides, you can find many other more worthwhile and useful books at this web site, Amazon.com, which is fast becoming the unofficial campus bookstore. Best deals best prices! for the Univ of Colorado. By the way I also use Macs, have a G3 at home besides my Pent 333 Win95/NT machine and yes, Macs are cool, but they will never again regain their lost market share and if you want to make money in the real world you have to develop for the Windows market........... like it or not.

(Please see my review written under Elaine R. Padilla)