The Flash Anthology: Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript [Paperback]

Steve Grosvenor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 2004

A practical and fun Flash book that shows readers over 60 practical techniques, solutions and cool effects to instantly use on their Website or project. The Flash Anthology makes an excellent task reference or it can be used for inspiration for future projects.

The book tackles the majority of the most common building blocks for real world Flash applications-as one reviewer described "it covers everything that Flash does best". Topics covered include working with external data, debugging, animation, sound and video effects, flash forms and getting indexed by search engines.

All the solutions are based on ActionScript, are completely customizable and come with suggested modifications. Examples are compatible with ActionScript 2 and Flash MX 2004.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Every Flash Solution You’ll Ever Need for your Flash Projects" -- Kevin Yank

Product Details

• Paperback: 455 pages
• Publisher: SitePoint Pty Ltd; 1 edition (June 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 095792187X
• ISBN-13: 978-0957921870
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,895,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Nice tricks but poor practices, January 18, 2005

By 

Raymond Brigleb (Portland, OR, United States) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Flash Anthology: Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript (Paperback)

I was rather excited about this book because I too like the O'Reilly Cookbooks and such titles, and this seems in that vein. Also, O'Reilly doesn't seem interested in updating the Cookbook any time soon, sadly, with AS2 examples and so forth, so I picked this one up.

Many of the tricks in the book are neat, especially for the beginner-to-intermediate target audience. However, I found the examples not very useful because they are (generally) written in ActionScript 1.0 rather than 2.0, even though the book's cover claims that it's intended for MX 2004. All the code reflects this short-sightedness.

All of the tweening is hand-coded, rather than using the classes that now come with Flash (and are very nice). Thing is, if I were to learn to write tweening code, I would learn from Robert Penner's book, and learn it right! If I'm just making neat menu interfaces, for instance, I would prefer to learn to use Macromedia's own code, and spend more time writing code that was more object oriented. The examples in this book are good, is what I'm saying, but the way you are taught is very limiting. It seems like more of a compendium of examples.

It just bothers me, at this point, to pick up new books that still use older coding styles. The problem is, when the student moves on to write object-oriented code, they have to rewrite all their old code which uses MovieClip prototypes and the like. It's like building a house on already-crumbling foundation. It would have been a great book, two years ago.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your 2nd Flash book!!!, February 17, 2006

By 

Frank Stepanski (PA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Flash Anthology: Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript (Paperback)

With so many Flash books on the market, its hard to find one that will fit your needs. There are beginner books, books that teach ActionScript basics, and books that focus on animation. But there are very few if at all that show the what you can really do with it after you know the basics.

This book gives the reader a true understanding of what can be really done with Macromedia Flash. Not just animation or text effects, but the whole gambit. There really is not another book out there now that goes over this much "real-world" examples in Flash. Believe me, I have purchased over 10+ books on Macromedia Flash in the past 2 years.

It assumes the reader has a general knowledge of the basics of Flash and that's it. It starts with an explanation of ActionScript (Flash's programming language): syntax basics, naming conventions, basic commands.

Then it continues with understanding the timeline in creating navigation effects for movies. Knowing how to use the timeline is one thing, but really understanding how the timeline can be used with creating Movieclips and ActionScript takes a slightly non-linear thinking that some people have trouble getting. The author really explains in great detail how the process is done with well-written examples to help the user "get it".

The book then goes into some intermediate to advanced topics with ActionScript like creating simple script libraries that can be re-used in many of your movies you create. After that it has some great and fun examples of how ActionScript is used to create those cool animations you see on other "professional" websites. I have long wondered how the h*ll that is done. But his book tells you exactly how it is done!

Towards the end of the book it focuses on using components, getting exernal data, incorporating video and sound and creating small applications with Flash.

I love the how the book flows because it makes it easy to follow if you are reading it in order or if you want to look for a particular topic to learn.

Many people just think of Flash as just an animation or drawing tool, but Flash is much more and with this book you will know too!

This is a great book for the Flash users who knows the basics and wants to know what Flash can really do and it can be for the advanced suer who wants to know something very specific and is tired of spending hours looking on internet forums (flashkit.com) to find an example.

A great Flash book that should be part of your library no matter what your skill level.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting tips and tricks to learn from, October 13, 2004

By 

Jack D. Herrington "engineer and author" (Silicon Valley, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Flash Anthology: Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript (Paperback)

The value in a book of tips and tricks is not the tricks themselves, it's what you can learn from how they are executed. That's what I like so much about this book. It doesn't just show you the code so that you can copy and paste it to make that exact effect. It explains each step of the code so that you learn more about the Flash platform in general. You can then use that knowledge and apply it to completely different effects.

The book starts with a variety of different effects and then ends with some information on Flash forms, which seems somewhat out of place. The text is clear and well written, and although there are lots of illustrations, that comes with the territory.

Anyone making a living out of Flash will want to have a look at this to see what they can learn from it.