Customer Reviews

Flash CS4 All-in-One For Dummies

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Maybe it's just me but these two "writers" (and I use the term loosely) should have their pencils taken away. Their code examples DON"T WORK! The download files that they say can be downloaded from their "Dummies site" are non existent. Evidently proof reading was too much of an effort. The tiny, tiny fonts used to show their (unworkable)code and high gloss paper make this book almost unreadable. All in all I should have purchased a couple of pizzas with the money I spent on this useless chunk of trash. I guess they really mean it when they say this book is for dummies....I was a real dummy for buying it that's for sure!!!

This is one of the poorest books I've ever used; my first and last of any of the dummies series. I have a programmer background but never used flash. Action script is a little strange but no big deal. It would be nice if the examples from their download page actually worked! Book IV chapter 1 "OnStage" "TextMove" as two of many examples: you just down load the examples and hit control + enter and it DOES NOTHNG!

I did find the error in another one (a missing semi-colon) but I could only know this from looking at OTHER code examples on the web! It is pretty hard to debug a language you don't know, I can't image how anyone with little or no programming background could figure it out.

Echo the poor organization from the above critiques and the 2 pages to say virtually nothing on obvious concepts and the poor explanations of the unique or more complex concepts.

Oh yea, try to get to the "registration" page where they'd be glad to hear from you or to provide information.

Go to the ADOBE web site and use the tutorials. Money well saved!

While I appreciate the relatively quick pace of "Flash CS4 All in One for Dummies", I can't agree with its description as being useful for both those completely new to flash as well as seasoned vets. It seems to fall squarely in the middle of those two groups much of the time, but then careens widely in either direction at the strangest times. The book is broken up into "sub" books, and the authors make it clear that the overall book should be treated as a reference guide and less as a straight read; this alone makes it a pretty tough read for someone completely new to Flash, but it also seems to make the strangest assumptions about what a new user would likely know and then one section later it spends multiple pages on information that isn't even specific to the Adobe Suite, nevertheless to Flash.

Most of the useful "what has changed with Flash" information is hidden throughout the book, so if you're familiar with a recent version of Flash, this isn't much of a helpful manual either. I was coming from a professional working knowledge of the rest of the Adobe Suite, but was years out of touch with Flash, so the book's mostly middle ground approach to CS4 was useful to me. However, I still felt like the presentation order of topics was unhelpful, and trying to read through the book quickly resulted in having to skip pages just as frequently as I had to go back a few pages wondering if I'd missed something.

There seemed to be a minimum amount of confusing typos, but honestly, the 3 or 4 I found that actually mixed up labels or broke code are really 3 or 4 too many for a "beginner's" guide. Also, the default layout and available windows in Flash tended to be different than what the Author's assumed they would be, so there are a few places of confusion that result from that.

All in all I found this book useful for what I needed to do, which was jump a big gap of missing knowledge of Flash, but I'm not sure how many others are looking for this book to do only that.

Hard to follow, for a beginner, information seems out of order at times, a couple of the tutorials have errors in them, and if you are new to Flash it will be frustrating to problem solve the book while trying to learn at the same time. I'd look elsewhere