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The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript, is a unique book for Flash Game Developers. Rather than focusing on a bunch of low-level how-to material, this book dives straight in to building games.
The book is divided into specific game-genre projects covering everything from old-classics such as a Missile Command-style game, to hot new genres such as tower defense.
Steve Fulton and Jeff Fulton are twin brothers who have worked in the web game industry for the past 10 years. Together they have designed, programmed and developed over 200 Flash games of every imaginable genre for the corporate, indie and viral Flash game markets. The brothers run the popular and influential Flash/Retro game development site 8bitrocket.com. They update the site daily with news, tutorials, games, and musing about Flash and the viral Flash game world.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Book But VERY Poorly Edited,
This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript (Paperback)
This book has some excellent educational content. If you can get past a staggering amount of typographical errors (some of them in source code!), it is a fantastic resource. If you are familiar with programming and want to learn how to program Flash and Flex games, I highly recommend these authors.
Their editor, however, needs to be shot. There are words missing from sentences every few pages, typos in the source code, and function names that change each time they are referenced. There's even a paragraph (on page 125) explaining a snippet of source code from the previous section... but the previous section of code has been totally rewritten, so the paragraph is worse than meaningless, it's totally confusing. There is an Errata section on the authors' website, but it doesn't even begin to cover the errors in this book. It is painfully apparent that the code in the book was typed in as text and then tested and debugged later, as many examples are inconsistent or have obvious syntax errors. If you are just starting out with programming I do NOT recommend this book UNLESS you download the accompanying source code. Otherwise you will spend too much time wondering why your program doesn't work when it's an error in the book itself. I hate to give this a crappy review. I am learning a lot from this book and I *WANT* this book to be as great as its subject matter could be. If the authors release a Second Edition or even a corrected version, I'll be first in line to pick it up. All that said, I still recommend this book. Their design principles are sound, and the code examples from their website actually work without any fussing or debugging. (There are some mispelled class names, but they are consistent, so the code DOES work.) If you are an experienced programmer who can spot typos in source code, and are patient with a debugger, the book will teach you exactly what you need to know to get your game off the ground.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
In serious need of better proofing.,
By Ben Fischer (Mill valley, CA, US) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript (Paperback)
On the positive: I am learning a lot from this book. The authors have an excellent approach to presenting the material, and at least for me, I feel the broad brush concepts they present, especially in organizing game code are very good. What is absolutely mind boggling is the number of typos in the constantly referenced source code. You are supposed to be building your code on previous exercises (good idea), however there are often changes to function and variable names, forcing you to debug code that is presented to you as an example. Perhaps it wouldn't be as glaring if they hadn't preceded every source sample in the book with the phrase 'we have highlighted the code that is different from that game.', when as it turns out there are often dozens of other subtle changes you'll need to catch yourself.
Inconsistent, or inaccurate information presented in source code presented as educational reference is a complete fail.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fast delivery, good book but poor edition,
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Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript (Paperback)
The book itself is good and the delivery was fast but. It seems like the book I got is an early edition. there's many mistakes and typos.
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