Macromedia Director is the #1 platform for creating interactive multimedia. Its power and versatility are unmatched, allowing users to merge text, graphics, animation, video, and sounds to create exciting, interactive desktop movies for use in presentations, CD-ROMs, and the Web. Although it's organized around the somewhat familiar metaphor of a film production, with cast, stage, scripts, and so on, Director is not known for its ease of use. Director 7 Demystified steps in to guide readers through the maze of sub-technologies (Lingo and Shockwave), technical skills, and creative concepts that they must master in order to tap the power of Director 7. Ideas are fully explained, then put into practice in the accompanying exercises. The included CD gives readers many of the tools and scripts they need to try out their new skills. The only book on Director to be endorsed and recommended by Macromedia, Inc., Director 7 Demystified brings you training from the source.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
The subtitle for Director 7 Demystified is "The Official Guide to Macromedia Director, Lingo, and Shockwave." Weighing in at nearly 1,200 pages and including a CD-ROM, this is nothing short of the truth.
This massive tome, broken up into three sections, covers Director from top to bottom. The first section alone is worth the price of admission, offering a guided tour of the user interface and the basics of creating animation in Director as well as creating interactive Director "movies" for the Web using Macromedia's Shockwave technology.
The finer details of using graphics are explained in chapter 6, which nicely covers some of Director 7's new features such as graphics with alpha channels (for transparency and compositing) and vector graphics (for resolution-independent images and for graphics files that are vastly smaller in size).
The second section, "Digging Deeper," assumes you have intermediate Director experience and long for some real production challenges. Rather than being technically intimidating, the book employs a more conversational approach, which really pays off in its discussion of more complicated tools like Lingo, the programming language that is the heart and soul of Director.
Section 3, "Special Topics," neatly packages all the loose ends that aren't normally covered: working with multiple Director movies, working with audio, importing digital video, and using and writing Xtras (extensions to Lingo). Most importantly, though, this section teaches you how to debug your Director movies during the development stage using all of Director's built-in tools.
And the book doesn't end there--the last part is a reference section with listings for Director resources on the Internet, a Lingo command listing, keyboard shortcuts, and a listing of third-party Director developers.
The authors took great pains to make this book complete. It is an ideal volume for beginning to intermediate users, and the Lingo reference section is great for the more advanced user. The only drawback is the immense size and weight of the book. Since it's broken up internally into four major sections, it would have been nice (and more practical) to bundle four smaller volumes as a boxed set, making each one far more physically manageable than the brick that this book is. --Mike Caputo
From Library Journal
You probably have many versions of this title already in your collection, but you will still want to get this one. Director gets upgraded about twice a year, and Roberts comes out with a new "Demystified" edition almost every fall. Although it's no longer the only game in town (there are excellent guides from O'Reilly and Que), Roberts's book is still very good. If your patrons include interactivity designers for the web and CD-ROM, then this book will circulate.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
46 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Start Here,
By Sean O'Neil (London, UK) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Director 7 Demystified: The Official Guide to Macromedia Director, Lingo, and Shockwave with CDROM (Paperback)
After slogging through D7 and Lingo Authorized--which is a boring read that condescends to anyone looking to take the big plunge--I found Dymystified to be a godsend. D7D has great tutorials (and doesn't take pages to explain how to copy a cast member, for example) but the best thing about this book is that it enables you to develop a process and good work habits. Learning software is one thing, learning productivity is paramount. It's an incredibly engaging read as well with none of the cynicism of the Nutshell books while acknowledging the idiosyncracies of the programme. A must have. This is your first stop if you know nothing about D7 and want to dig deep. Can't recommend it enough.
28 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dymystified for Beginers!,
This review is from: Director 7 Demystified: The Official Guide to Macromedia Director, Lingo, and Shockwave with CDROM (Paperback)
GOOD JOB GUYS! I first started my relationship with Director by downloading the trial version. I played around alittle with the program, before long I realized that I needed to get some kind of training if I intended to use this software. Although I have not finished this book yet, in a very short time I was able to make sharp looking designs and presentations. I learned how and why, or when and when not to for that matter, to import movies and custom graphics along with how to design using the tools from within Director . This book has worked wonders for me! I highly recomend it to any beginers. What would have taken me months to learn on my own, I learned in minutes with this book.
32 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Ultimate Takeoff,
By
This review is from: Director 7 Demystified: The Official Guide to Macromedia Director, Lingo, and Shockwave with CDROM (Paperback)
After reading the Authorized D7 book (also by Gross), I knew I had a lot of fun but did not feel at ease with lingo. Besides, the Nutshell editions looked still somehow arcane to someone who did not know any programming but some JavaScript rollovers. So I dived into the Demystified trip, which has almost concluded (btw, it's pretty fun to read). My advise is: if you are new to director, or if you happen to be afraid of lingo, this might just be the best place to start. The trip is long, but Gross does his best to keep comprehensive. Next step? I guess getting into the OOP stuff. (although this book deals with basic OOP). Enough, anyway, to step into the O'Reilly Jungle. Or at least to do with Director twice the things you can do to Lara Croft. One more thing: Forget about the Authorized edition: This one's a much better teacher.
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