Customer Reviews

Flash 5 ActionScript Studio

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

 

 

Yes, I have to agree...One thing that simply should not be tolerated in any teaching venue, is teaching people mistakes.
This is not the first FOE book, or even the first book,
(yes, Moock's ivory tower work) that I have found mistakes in the code examples. I am a student at this point, and yes, I
don't fully "get it", as well I shouldn't. If we were all at the "intermidiate to advanced" level we wouldn't need these books.

Go through hand coding one of the examples, then watch it fail miserably. Go back and re-read it, compairing it to the code in the book and get very frustrated because "you don't get it". Then give up and re-type the whole thing. Watch it fail miserably. By this time, your learning experience is wasted. Then go to the downloaded code and hold it next to the code in the book. Viola! Then ask yourself "What the hell did I just learn?" By that time you begin to question the whole book and your teaching experience is wasted and compromised.

How long would a college professor last if he/she did the same thing? Do we check our examples before we publish?
I think not.

So sad, FEO, your on the bleeding edge, but in your rush to publish, I think you may bleed to death. I'm one of your best customers, I've bought all of your action script series, including New Masters 2001, because the kernel is there, as are loads of mistakes. I've held off on writing one of these poor reviews, but now I feel compelled to ask, "When are you guys gonna hire a decent proof reader and someone to varify the code examples, as well as the lesson progressions?" I hope that packaging, marketing and merchandising has not become your singular focus, because at least that component of your efforts seems to be working very well.
(see carls jr., any current boy band, windows for dummies, the gap)

This book is, along with Moock's Actionscript book for O'Reilly, the first really solid book covering programming in Flash 5. That includes good stuff on planning projects, code structuring, OOP, design, and XML much more in depth than any other Flash book I've seen. It is definately advanced, perhaps not to the point of some of the hardcore OOP coders on the Flash lists, but quite complex and more than enough to challenge most readers, which is good.

The projects are good and varied, and it seems like Friends of Ed has at last gotten someone to insure that coding styles are reasonably consistant throughout the book--other of their Flash books have been essentially collections of inconsistant and often incompatible articles. The usual suspects do show up (spaceship games and rotating 3D cubes), but presented with a level of detail and thoroughness totally absent in other books (short tutorial in matrix math anyone?)

The great chapters on Sound and XML are almost worth the price alone, but the standout chapter is called "Creativity in Practice" and covers invaluable stuff like: working in teams, interaction planning, prototyping, information architecture, even some usability. In other words, the stuff that professional designers do the 80% of the time they're not messing around with software. It's exciting to see these topics appear in what could have been just another coding book.

I won't dock it a star, but one qualm is that it doesn't come with a CD (again contrary to Kevin's review below). You have to download about 80Megs of files from the publishers site. Come on guys, if there's no CD at least knock a few bucks off the price. And even at high-speeds, that 80Meg download is kind of a pain.

This is by far the WORST book I have ever seen on ActionScript. I am currently on Chapter 3 right now, and I want to tell you guys what this book put me through. Bear in mind, that I am only on chapter 3, and that I will update this review IF it gets better afterwards. First I went through Chapter 1, which is a short introduction to changes from Flash 4 to Flash 5, and some minor rules that you need to read. Alright, great detailed book so far. Onward. Chapter 2 deals with animation in Flash 5, giving us a very quick and short rundown on many of the actionscript properties. The description was good, and the explanation was clear, BUT, you HAVE to understand this BEFOREHAND to be able to follow the instructions to the fullest. What I mean is, say that they explain to you what 10 different things do. Well, in their code, they're going to use those 10 different things they just taught you. You may think "well duh, that's what they're teaching you." Well guess what folks, they go through those 10 different things, and they use it to the fullest. What I mean is, they will use those 10 things at the most advanced level you can imagine that you WILL be lost if you're trying to LEARN this. Lucky for me, I had basic animations down, so this was a breeze for me. I was worried, but ready to move on. Chapter 3 comes. THIS is where it starts to really get to me and where the book completely and miserably utterly fails. In this chapter we are taught to create a menu. This menu is completely scripted, able to collapse with sub-menus and all. I was extremely excited to 'learn' how to do this. So I start reading. They teach you, in this chapter: functions, arrays, all the loops, and also smart clips. Once again, they use ALL of those things they teach to it's fullest extent. And again you may think "man, this guy is stupid, he needs to understand that the book is telling him to take it slow and learn it one bit at a time." Okay, so you may be right. So I take the time to go through Flashkit.com and were-here.com and also read the O'Reilly book on ActionScript. I learnt more about functions, arrays, loops, and smartclips even more before I completed this chapter. After using those things over and over on several different tutorials, I felt I was ready to handle anything. So I go back to this book, and once again, I am lost. This book does NOT tell you how to create things step-by-step. I know Flash 5 functionality like the back of my hand, yet this book fails miserably because it is confusing. Take for example, the book tells me to create a movieclip, and then 2 more movieclips. Yet, at NO time does it tell you WHERE to place the movieclips. Whether they are to go on the main stage, inside each other, and whatnot. THEN, the book has the audacity to tell me to write a long 8 lines of codes that are BARELY explained, and after doing so, I look at the example .FLA that I downloaded from the book's web site, and the codes are COMPLETELY different. This is a sad sad sad book, and I recommend that you do NOT get this book. The only good thing about this book is that it has some sample codes that you MAY be able to use. Once again, DO NOT buy this book unless you are an expert of ActionScript and you are just trying to fill in the gaps rather than learn it.

I am currently working on Chapter 3 of this book. The book instructs you to create a lot of very cool things. In chapter 3 you work on building a hierarchical menu utilizing arrays and for loops. Very cool right?

Think again!

At one point the book instructs you to test your movie as it should now be functional. I did so only to find out that it was not. I headed over to the friends of ed website, and did a search in the their forums. Apparently this is a problem everyone is having. The author responded by saying that he knew it was a problem but would only fix it AFTER he finished his next book!

Unreal. Do not buy this [junk].

Reading this book was like trying to learn trig on acid; it jumps around all over the place without ever trying to establish any clear points. It will start discussing one topic and without any conclusion or in depth explanation go on to the next topic. I found that very frustrating. It seems as if the writer(s) cannot write a clear and logical set of instructions. Do not buy this book unless you are an expert in Actionscript, and in that case you won't probably need it anyhow.

Friends of Ed are not exactly known for their editorial skills as well as for their proof reading (neither am I, I should warn). But there is a lot of content. I just wish the material were explained better and the materials overview were more structured, so one could easily return to the book and find bits and pieces more easily. Other than that it has some great examples. I gave it 4 stars, not for the typos, but rather for the lack of clarity. So, if you need someone to hold your hand and walk you through, this might not be the ideal book for you.

OK, we are talking FLASH here, and that means the authors are designers, not coders...and so from that perspective, this book is pretty good, because working through the examples will give anyone a good stock of techniques...and on Flash ActionScript content it gets good marks.
If someone was to grade this book not on Flash ideas but on technical accuracy, then it would not do too well...because there are glaring non-Flash errors...Topology (incorrectly defined by the authors) typically has only an indirect effect on forces, despite the fact that Topologists have studied chaos using topological methods...Geometry and curvature are the major relevant math fields here...
The identity matrix is written down wrong...obvious to those who know matrices but will just confuse others, but really the whole matrix discussion shows little understanding of the underlying principals of linear transformations and is just a cook book approach. The rotation matrices are written down, but there is not even a diagram to define the angles phi and theta...Do the authors even realize that the conventions for these angles vary depending if it is a math book or physics book? Certainly a beginner should be given a diagram for clarity. Granted, these are non-Flash issues, but they need to be mentioned...The introduction of 3d rotations will only be of value to those who have already studied them in either Mechanics or Engineering, again due the cookbook nature (and the errors and ambiguities) in which they are presented...

...still, a good book for learning ActionScript techniques and certainly recommended, but consult the math and physics books for applied math and physics!

Friends of Ed has been publishing great books on Macromedia Flash consistently in the recent months, and this one actually has some fundamental coverage like concept design and project structure then moved on to advance topics such as XML integration, Generator, etc. Basically a little bit of everything starting from the intermediate level Flash developers can use. My only complaints is the black and white printing, and no CD-Roms, but all the source files can be download from Friends of Ed's web site. Keep up the good work FOE!

I bought this book with the intention of learning more in depth use of actionscript with all of its wonders...Instead, I was bombarded with too much game design stuff. The table of contents was misleading and the focus of the book was useless for true web design.

There are many books out there for actionscript, I suggest any of the others.

This book asn't for people who just started out ActionScripting but for intermediate and advanced actionscripter. The book teaches you technique that would be very useful when writing your own script.