Customer Reviews

The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book is gold, not only did it answer a lot of my questions about some specific technologies like Red5 and Flash-Develop, but it also gave me a very detailed introduction to AMFPHP. Most of all, a new found respect for Apache Ant.

The book tried to cover so many different topics and so many different aspects of Opensource flash development that it was difficult to jump though the book. A lot of the concepts were basic and meant for a beginner, nevertheless this book will guide you in the ways of creating a open-source development environment more effectively then you would ever be able to discover yourself. Personally I would have liked to see more as3, however they kept it nice and 'open' so that anyone could learn from it.

Overall, this book is getting a 5 because even though some of the content was a little dated.(Like any book) the concepts that it offered were solid. This book was a rare one because I was able to read though it easily. It held my interest the entire time.

Don't waste your time or money on this garbage!!!! Lousy!!!! i own over 100 technical books, and never have i found one as horrible as this. There is some good info but the type you can easily get from internet documentations. I bought this book because I wanted to learn about integrating flash with red5 and the chapters on red5 were pathetic, for example, under red 5 chapter, page 321, it tells you to go to a url and "download the zip file", no name for the file, no description, just "the file". That's pathetic considering there are many files and none appear to fit the described file needed. Then I go to the web site that is in the book to set up red5 with eclipse and there is nothing there that remotely looks like what is described in the red5 chapter. These people put in a minimal effort. Very very disappointing. Unacceptable for a serious development book. I will never buy any book with Chris Allen or John Grden as authors or contributors,

This is definitely a book all serious Flash developers should read. It is the gateway to professional Flash development. The book is written by a collection of some of the most recognizable personalities in the Open Source Flash community. Learn your options as a Flash developer and break free from standard IDEs and workflows. Get introduced to mant external libraries, frameworks, and development tools.

~ Paul Milbourne
Author, Essential Guide to Flash CS4 with ActionScript
Founder, Baltimore Washington Flash User Group

As you probably know, the open source Flash community is mainly gathered around the osflash.org website. The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development is a collection of some of the best open source projects that run the whole gamut of the open sourced Flash world. It reveals a lot of detail on how these projects can be integrated into a consistent open source SWF workflow. It is amazing how many things can be done using open source tools. In the next paragraph there is a quick summary of what I have found in the book.

Chapter 1 (written by Aral Balkan) introduces the world of open source Flash. In chapter 2, Marc Hughes presents a brief introduction to some of the open source tools that are available. Many of them are presented in the book. Chapter 3 (Marc Hughes) covers installing and setting the open source tools necessary for Flash development. Chapter 4 (Marc Hughes) is about working with designers and other people using the open source workflow which was configured in chapter 3. In chapter 5 (Marc Hughes) you can find a nice introduction to testing and debugging ActionScript 2 and 3 projects using AsUnit, FlexUnit and Xray. First two provide a framework for unit testing. Xray provides a mechanism for logging and runtime inspection of SWF files. Chapter 6 (Marc Hughes) is devoted to embeding Flash-based applications in HTML pages as well as following best practices for organizing and deploying web content. In chapter 7, Wade Arnold explores AMFPHP, an open source gateway for easily connecting a Flash player-based application to PHP. While reading chapter 8 (R.Jon MacDonald) we learn about SWX, the native data format for the Flash Platform which is of great importance especially for Flash Lite developers. In chapter 9, Nicolas Cannasse talks about haXe, a high-level programming language for web development. In chapter 10, Moses Gunesch talks about Fuse and GoASAP, two open source ActionScript (2.0 and 3.0) libraries for coding animations. Chapter 11 is all about Papervision3D. Andy Zupko shows there how to configure and use this great open source ActionScript 3D environment. Chapters 12 and 13 are devoted to Red5 (Chris Allen, John Grden), an open source Java-based server which supports audio and video streaming. As you can see there is a lof of versatile stuff inside this book.

This book is awesome. It opens to the reader amazing world of the open source Flash treasures. It shows how to prepare and use a powerfull, useful and personalized Flash-based programming environment for free. It gives also a great opportunity to start being a part of the open source Flash community and maybe to start contributing. If you use commercial tools like Adobe Flash you can also benefit from this book by learning about internals and variety of solutions available for aware developers. I have learnt about many interesting open source tools I now use alongside commercial ones. One such a tool is ant. Another is FlexUnit to name just a few. I cannot live without them now. To sum it up, I have waited for such a book for a long time and now, when it is available, it is definitely worth buing and reading.

I found the book to be exactly what it said. Is it essential? No, I could have found most of this stuff on the web. But it was very handy and useful.

Open Source Flash Development is an excellent book for Flash developers that want to enhance their data-driven Flash applications. It covers the most essential about the so presently so used swfObject, AMFPHP, SWXPHP, Papervision3D, RED5 and many more! This book was indeed a must for me, therefore I strongly recommend it.
Carlos Amaral (Lusoned Interactieve Media, The Netherlands)

I saw one copy of this at Powell's Technical Books in Portland yesterday, and picked it up, figuring it was new. It was--just published in the last few weeks. I haven't delved into it as much I would like, but that doesn't matter here because I carefully reviewed the contents before purchase.

So: why buy this book? If you're working with Flash and ActionScript 3.0 currently, you know the Flash world is a moving target that changes very rapidly, and the main reason for this is the addition of open-source tools and "classes." This book gives us a needed status-check on what's currently available, how to get it and how to use it.

In my case, I was mostly interested in Papervision3D, the Google add-on that has rapidly gone from cute curiosity to must-have in every Flash developer's bag of tricks. However, you don't really need this book for Papervision3D--there's plenty of documentation available online.

Likewise, if all you really want to know is how to implement SWFObject (a popular add-in that lets you update a Flash element by updating your html or external text file), or how to make Flex work with XML, you may not need or want this book.

But if you like to read about some fun new stuff that's available and that you might like to explore--all of kinds of mashups, FUSE, HAXE, Red5 video--then grab this book right away. It's readable, fresh, and informative--like most Friends of ED books. Also like most other Friends of ED books, it will rapidly go out of date as the moving target moves on!

I purchased this book as a gift for my husband. He said the book is very detailed and has helped him with his programming skills.

Anyone using Macs to develop in flash will be very critical of this book and deservedly so because this book appears to be heavily Windows biased. For instance, chapter 3 is "Preparing an Open Source Workflow", a critical chapter for those of us who want to work in a different IDE than the flash one, the author discusses how to implement an open source workflow for ActionScript 3 with FlashDevelop: "FlashDevelop is Windows only...OS X or Linux... should look at FDT, which is mentioned in the "ActionScript 2 Development" section...it is also capable of creating ActionScript 3 applications."

FDT is a proprietary software that requires a license, either commercial or an open source one if the company grants it. And why is ActionScript 3 for Macs discussed in the ActionScript 2 section? I gently flipped through the rest of book determined not to waste my time on another useless flash book (the world is awash in them). Some Mac users may find the book useful but I didn't bother to go any further when a critical chapter like the third one pretty much insulted every mac - flash developer.