I decided to get this book because I wanted to decide whether or not to use it as part of my design process for my Flex projects. I am an intermediate Flex developer. I have always designed project on paper and then taken them straight to Flex Builder (now Flash Builder). I wanted to see if incorporating Adobe Illustrator and Flash catalyst into my design process was worth my time.
The book starts out nice. The author does a good job building your enthusiasm and teaching some basics about working in Illustrator and Flash Builder. Throughout the first half of the book the author takes you through some helpful examples to get you use to the process flow of working in Illustrator (or Photoshop), Flash catalyst, and Flash Builder. Unfortunately, this is where the book hits a major stumbling block.
The goal of the second half of the book is to walk through building a project from designing it in Illustrator to importing the project into Flash catalyst, to finally exporting the project to Flash Builder. At this point all is well. The problem starts when you have to use files that are supposedly available on the publisher's website. The compressed zip files for the project only contain a single Illustrator file that shows you what the project should look like at the end of the chapter. It became very frustrating when I had to go into the end-of-chapter file extract the images needed for the lesson, export them to Photoshop, optimize them, and then finally save them so I could use them in the lessons. There are several Illustrator files you need to import and they are nowhere to be found.
Unfortunately it seems the author was using a pre-release version of the Adobe CS5 tools because there are steps he tells you to follow and they do not exist in the software. One example of this is that he refers to some brush strokes that are not standard in Adobe Illustrator. I imagine he imported them from a third party site.
I have contacted the publisher (4/12/2011) regarding the missing files and they said they would look into it and get back to me. I will update this review with their response.
For the moment I can't recommend this book because it is incomplete. I only hope that the publisher and author can get together and make the necessary files available.