Customer Reviews

Flash 5 Hands-On Training

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I can't say enough about how Lynda and assoc. writes books. I've bought too many books, such as Flash Magic books, Visual Quick start Foundation Flash & others. Really, I bought too many that sit unused becuase they were not inspiring to me!<<<<

I know that I am coming from a beginner to intermediate user, but I have a mad passion for REAL well written tutorial books with quicktime movies. Lynda's books deliver BIG TIME!

She take GREAT care, step by step, trying to show you how to do her tutorials with out loosing a step.

The other books such as Visual Quickstart books and Flash Magic books really seemed to be geared for more of advanced geek type user. All of them and I've read and browsed many, do not teach as complete as she does.

I just feel that there are not very many books out there that teach software the way Lynda's books do. There is something very uplifting about her books. i almost feel like I could go door to door trying to sell her books they are that good.

Sure there will be geeky people that feel her approach is to simplistic. But they miss the BOAT BIG TIME!!!!!!!!!

O by the way I bought Foundation Flash as well. Again, all the other books that are not written by her from other companies just don't have the gift that she does! That real step by step approach.

We all go through life trying to find things that are uplifting, artistic. We see Van Gough paintings, we great bridges built. We see and hear great music.

We also see and read great books.
She can teach, and teach very well indeed.
* * * * *

I give 5 stars to this great book and I'll tell you why.

At first I was little impressed by the size of this book, but when I started to read it I discovered that it was so fast and easy to read.

This book is intended for begginers and intermediate Flash users.

I have 5 Flash books, 3 intended for beginners and 2 for intermediate, and this one has really made me feel that Flash is under my control. It has given me tips you won't find in the Flash help.

It has 17 chapters. I have read one chapter every day. In less than 3 weeks you will learn what every Flash user, beginner, intermediate or expert should know.

The knowledge you'll gain with this easy reading book (but full of information, excercises and samples) will help you all the way until you become a Flash master.

Wanna save time and money? Buy Flash HOT Book. These guys really know how to teach. They don't try to impress you with dark concepts you can't understand. They haven't forgotten they were newbies some day. They know the art of teaching.

I really recommend this book to beginners. Soon you will have the knowledge and tools to unleash your creativity and start creating movies and web sites.
Then you can buy whatever intermediate or advanced book you want. You'll be ready for the next level stuff.

I've taken a number of software tutorials and this one was the best. First, the exercises were short ones so I could walk away from the computer and come back and not be lost. Second, I found very few errors in the book, and the ones I did find were non- tutorial-affecting. I've taken far too many tutorials in which the files weren't available on the CD or the lesson didn't work as described or there were glaring grammatical or spelling errors throughout.

I liked this book a lot because it didn't spend as much time on the graphics aspect of Flash as other books do (and then they spend too little time on the animation aspect). I've dinked around with the program before. Now I feel I have a sound background in the program. This is one of the few tutorials I have ever completed; it's the first Flash one I have. The projects held my interest and showed me things about the program that I hadn't yet discovered.

I recommend this book to any beginner and anyone who has played around with the program but doesn't have a good grasp on its capabilities.

The quality of the materials is very good (5 stars) for a beginner to learn Flash features but not applications. Do not buy if your goal is to understand how to make useful Flash movies quickly. After reviewing many, I selected this one for a 15 week junior college credit interactive design course I have taught for 7 years for content quality, error free step by step exercises, and beginner level. I am now in the process of breaking the chapters apart and rearranging into a useful course outline so students can use Flash quickly. The book suffers from emphasizing teaching features and not applications; i.e., how to put it all together, until the last 1/4 of the book. This means you will spend about four hundred pages learning details about Flash, many of which are not needed to put together useful applications such as a banner ad, cartoon, or a page based Flash site. A good example is the color diatribe in the first chapters. The color knowlege is not going to have anything to do with your ability to put together a Flash movie and would have been better near the end of the book. However, there are no other books I found in 12/2001 that give the beginner a quick trip to useful applications that I would like in my course, so at this writing this is your best choice for a step by step exercise beginner book because of the quality. After you use this I then recommend Macromedia Flash 5 Training From The Source, not for a beginners, with Chrissey Rey as the next best step by step exercise book.

i have been dabbling with flash for awhile now. i do HTML sites and a lot of print work, but i've been dying to become more comfortable with flash. i hardly have time to take a night class, so i tried this line of books. Hands-On-Training books are the way to go! you go at your own pace and it is in a class-like layout, one step at a time. the CD-ROM contains everything you need and the Quicktime movies serve to explain the tricky things in detail while showing you exactly what is going on! the tone of their teaching is fun and understandable and never goes over your head. i am so thrilled, i now feel like i can actually USE this program! i have also previously bought the dreamweaver H.O.T. book, and it too was fantastic. these books are not meant to be reference books, they are teaching books. i recommend buying a reference book later (the Visual Quick Start line is great for the price). also, it is nice to get a book that uses Mac as its teaching tool, though it is easily translatable into Windows.

what a bang for the buck! and to think i wanted to take a course for $450!

I've tried 3 or 4 other books while trying to learn Flash over the last two years. This is the one that finally got me way up the learning curve.

Overpriced? No, I don't think so. The authors and editors put in a helluva lot of work on this book, breaking the subject matter into digestible lessons and then double-checking the tutorials. I've paid as much for other books that taught me nothing (because they weren't user-friendly and didn't keep my interest) and paid six times as much for one-day courses that were excellent but 50% forgotten a week later.

I see some of the other reviewers complain that the book does a little too much hand-holding and baby-talking. Well, if you haven't got much going on in your life, then I suppose you can teach yourself Flash by trial-and-error and by trying to read the inscrutable Macromedia manuals. The rest of us, with real lives, really need and appreciate the baby-step tutorials and extras on the CD.

The authors are teachers and seem to be warm human beings as well. I would not only recommend this book, I'd look forward to taking real, live classes from them.

I received this book for Christmas, never having done ANYTHING with Flash. Now I'm creating websites, banners, and intro movies! This book, however, is for COMPLETE beginners. Do not buy it if you already know a good share of information. Besides that, I can't think of any other book (and I've been through many) that are as informative and understandable as this one. Simply a must have.

This book was written by teachers for learning,and it does it better than any other books I've seen. It doesn't hurt that she really knows her Flash as well.

Some will bypass the book because it isn't a top notch reference guide for the experienced person. My view is "What good is a reference manual if you don't have a good book to teach you?"

You won't do better than this book for learning Flash.

I just wanted to commend the authors of this great book! I just started to learn Flash and this book has been the great resource for us newbies to this fabulous but complicated program. I haven't found a better beginner book that compares to this one. I rate this book a positive 10!!!!!

I went to the library and looked at Flash books first before buying. From the Dummies series to the old QUE series books that I have bought in the past, the H-O-T book caught my eye and I checked it out (with 5 other "learn flash" books).

This book reads like a classroom course on how to use Flash from an introduction to vector and timeline based applications to an entry level ActionScript and other much more advanced features of Flash 5 (and now the new Flash MX as well). This is not the last Flash book you will ever buy, there are much more advanced features that 700+ pages can not cover... but if you want a very solid foundation to learn Flash from; if you have bought dummies series books and found them interesting and humorous, but not enough learning depth; if you have bought books that were WAY over your head so that you were lost after the third chapter... THIS IS the book for you.

Get this book if you have a background in HTML and web page publishing, but have yet to take the "plunge" to Flash application and animation. Go through the book right there at the computer desk and you WILL learn Flash. Afterward you will be ready to use at least 80% of Flash features without having to dive back into a "reference" book to remember how to "do that one thing."

This is not a book to read while on the plane or the bus. Sitting in front of your computer will be a must as it WILL teach you, step by step how to complete a task. And the following lesson will discretely review in the background what you learned previously as it teaches you something new. The book will show you two to three ways to complete the same task so that you can choose (as you will in the following lesson) the way the works best for you.

The CD-ROM comes with all the lesson files and it includes nicely done demo movies of about ten of the more difficult tasks. Well thought out book I would recommend for anyone who is taking learning Flash seriously.