Customer Reviews

Essential Flash 4 for Web Professionals

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

There isn't much explaination about the action as I expected to see and learn. If you are a beginner, this book can be useful. For all other level, I don't reccomend it!

First of all, I did read the reviews here before buying. This book, as others said, is for someone that has never used Flash before and wanted a book that assumed nothing and walked you through a few very detailed exercises. And that it does wonderfully.

Except...and I have checked and rechecked, her examples do not seem to come out as the ones she points out on a web site. Further, the URL she lists is agonizingly long! After a few hours in the book, you would of figured an interactive program like Flash would sway the author into a more inviting site. I've been developing web sites for a long time, and if your web page is more than a few "/"'s in, forget it. A site like "www.learnflashfast.com" would have been great...not this "www.mybuddiesbiz.com/opps-not-here/opps-one-more/tired-yet/alas.html".

But that's being a wee nitpicky....and really the only place I an find fault in the book, which is more like a guide.

Asides my moronic self becoming lost in a few of her examples (caffiene required!), I've learned more in a weeks time than any other software package and book.

Summary: If you know a little about Flash, this book will bore you to tears. If you are totally new to Flash, or have "always wanted to learn", this is the one. You'll whiz through the book at blazing speed and be on your own in no time.

While an okay beginner resource, I found this book to be little more than a rehash of Darrel Plant's Flash books of two years ago. The improvements of Flash 4 over Flash 3 are numerous, and aside from a brief description of MP3 compression I found few references to them. Additonally, the FS Command and Tell Target features (which are central to Flash 4's increased interactivity) are ignored, and the advanced tutorials on the Generator toolbar and scriptibility functions are missing entirely. By and large, I found this book a waste of my money and will caution potential designers to look elsewhere if they want anything but an enhancement of the Macromedia-written Flash manual.

I don't know what it was about Flash, but I needed a new mindset to get me "jump-started". This book did that for me. I'm up and running and loving Flash 4 . If you're NOT comfortable working with timelines, but want to learn Flash for use on the web...this is the book. It worked for me.

I certainly can see why an experienced user would be dissapoined by this book, but this book is not for experienced users. I dissagree with the bad reviews that this book has received. Myself, beeing new to Flash found this book to be very helpful as it starts out with the very basics of drawing in Flash. If you are experienced with other Macromedia drawing programs you will pick it up quickly. It then moves on to more complicated animations and even has a section on how to configure Flash on a webserver. The chapter that covers optimization is very helpful as well. For a tutorial you just can't beat books like this. I'm willing to forgive a few editorial mistakes if the content is good.

While I had an idea this title was for beginners, the name of the book makes other implications "...for Web Professionals". This title is not for "Web Professionals"...at least not as I know the term. This is strictly a beginner book that provides precious little and often times less (when it comes to ActionScript and similar powerful new capabilities) than the manual offers. The "professional" portion of the title for the book is inapporpriate for the content.

In most ways this is a typical tutorial book. Talk about a feature . . . work on a project using the feature. The exercises were pretty good and so were the explanations. If you are already good at Flash, this may not be a good choice of books, as it doesn't get very advanced.

One thing I like about this book is that the publishers have all of the source files for download on a web site (as opposed to putting them on a CD). You'll notice that this book is considerably cheaper than similar books. When you download the files, you have the choice of loading them one at a time, as you need them, or you can download them all at once (packed into a zip archive).

The one thing that sets this tutorial apart from others is that it makes available, the source files for the projects at every step of the way. As I complete tutorials, I like to experiment a lot. It was very useful to have these source files to resort to in times that my experimentation totally screwed up the project.

If you are a beginner or intermediate at Flash I recommend this book.

The examples are too basic, the design is boring and canned. If you have any graphic design skill whatsoever, you are already ahead of this book, even if you have never touched Flash.

Buy Hillman Curtis' 'Flash Web Design' for inspiration about designing in Flash and the 'Flash 4 Bible' to figure out how to accomplish it. But don't waste your money on this one.

This book is way to basic. When you go through the exercises, it doesn't explain the steps. Yes, it gives you step by step, but what are they? I mean, anyone could follow instructions, but without actaully telling why each step is there, you're not realy learning anything!

I agree with one of the reviewers comments, that the URL linking to the examples are TOO LONG! , I get tired just typing it out.

I prefer to have several books on one subject, if you can not find some information in one book , there is every time a possibility to find it in another book, but this one so useless.

It is almost impossible to do exercise because step-by-step described in this book just doesn't work. Also if you trying to work with downloadable exercises they are sometimes absolutely different from book information. For example button action. You can reed in the book (p.76):

"By changing the spheres to buttons in the middle and last keyframe, and leaving the first keyframe as a graphic, we are telling Flash to treat them as buttons after the 15-th keyframe..."

But in download example all three keyframes are buttons. This example work fine, but yours made from book working very strange.

I would suggest for beginners and intermediate buying "Flash for Windows and Macintosh (Visual Quickstart Guide)".