Customer Reviews

The Essential Guide to Flash Games: Building Interactive Entertainment with ActionScript

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

This book has way too many errors and omissions. The authors often forget entire words, making it hard to guess what they intended. They don't explain concepts as well as they should, and they assume you have a PC. If you only have a mac, you can't download a program called "Mappy" which is necessary to complete some of the games in this book.

The authors did do a good job of picking games that demonstrate key principles of game design, so if you can make your way through this book, you will probably be able to make the game you want to make. Unfortunately, if you aren't already an expert programmer, you're going to have a tough road ahead of you.

Hard to imagine a better resource from a better set of folks. The book covers the techniques and technologies required to build games in today's Actionscript 3 environments to a high and much needed level. The authors are clearly competent for their subject. Any working engineer, game designer, or producer should be using this book.

I have most of the flash game design books...this one is the tutor for you. easy to understand, good content as well. look forward his more books.

First, I am only half way through this book (page 242) and so far I think this is the best flash game book out there because it covers both Flash and Flex. If you are new to Actionscript, they tell you very early on to get the Flash ActionScript 3.0 book for Flash and Flex (page 6). Basically, you need to be comfortable coding to go through this book. Second, you pretty much HAVE to get the source code. This is true no matter what for ANY code based book. If you don't you are doing yourself a disservice.

The best thing about this book is the source code. Go to the book's page on the publisher's site and download the code. You will refer to this over and over again. There are both code corrections, and versions for of the code for both the Flash and Flex code and yes, there are differences. they even have a specific download which helps you get started with Flex (Chapter 1 code). The way I have been going through this book is to read the chapter, type in the code and then make any corrections you need to make. Usually, I start with the book text and then open the source code for the Flex specific implementation. Also, they talk about FlashDevelop though they don't have a specific version for it.

One thing I did not expect was the tools that they tell you about which are critical for automating tasks like creating a levels or music and sound effect.

The only bad thing is that as you go on in the book, they split the code up into chunks with descriptions in between. Because the code (often for the same class) is fragmented, it can become difficult to follow. Again, with access to the source code, it is pretty easy to follow and review.

If you are rookie to making flash games, this is a essential book.
You will discover the basic tecnics ( not only for AS3) to create games.

First i must admit that I'm huge fan of [...] (Jeff and Steve Fulton's blog). It's great place for flash game developers, full of valuable tutorials and articles.Main goal of this book is to write reusable and professional ActionScript 3.0 game framework. To achieve this authors walk step by step through process of building 11 real-life games (ranging from arcade, puzzle to shooters). All source codes are avaliable for both platforms: Flash IDE and Flex (of course free to download through publisher website). First chapter cover some basic features. Introduce to main game loop (with states) and some game framework foundations. Of course it's based on some standard techniques (movie clips as actors, hitTestObject for collision detection, timeline for animations). Boring? Absolutely no! They develop two playable cool retro games just in 40 pages. Every next chapter brings more and more complex features to learn. To name a few:- tricky implementation of finite state machine pattern ( show how to manage flow of game with this states) - some free tools, that can extremely speeding up prototyping process- optimization by using tile sheets instead of individually bitmaps- sound management- deep description of "blitting" render method (explain when this method is important, and when is not - pages 233 - 238, is must read part). There is even a bit of history about blitting technique on 8-bit computers- xml based level designing- scrolling tile-based screens- pixel-level collision detectionFor those who wants to monetize theirs games there is great example of MochiAds system integration.In my opinion, it is the most valuable book about seriously flash games developing avalaible on the market. The most important thing: authors does not avoid complex techniques, they just explain problems on real-life game examples.Highly recomended!

With multiple games appearing in the first chapter, the Essential Guide to Flash Games starts with a bang. Sure, they're very simple games at first. However, as the authors mention several times throughout the book, finishing a game is an important milestone that makes it easier to finish the next. The rest of the book spreads out the new (and more complex) games a bit more, of course, but I think the jam-packed first chapter is a great way to get a reader interested.

There's a lot of code in this book (compared to most programming books I've read). That might be intimidating to some, but honestly, games can require more code than you might think. The authors explain it all very well, though. Plus, some of it is duplicated from earlier sections to show tweaks and changes in context. The authors follow a very consistent structure in every game, and that certainly makes understanding all the new code very easy. While I'm not a huge fan of their coding style, that doesn't detract from all the useful information that they share with each new game.

If you've never made a game and you want to get started, this book will provide some nice guidance and a lot of great insights from experienced developers. If you're new to Flash in general, I recommend picking up something different to learn a bit about ActionScript first. If you've already made a couple Flash games on your own, I think this book is still worth a look. The Essential Guide to Flash Games taught me a few things, and that makes it a book I'm happy to recommend to others.