Customer Reviews

Flash MX: Graphics, Animation & Interactivity

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

 

 

I cannot give less than 5 stars, Mohler did a phenom-job of writing this book. Every question that I asked myself while I was reading eventually was answered, usually within the next few pages. Also he provides information on bitmaps and audio in a detailed fashion (a chapter for each), which might[tick] you off, but there is a connection between those items and Flash, it's just harder to see when your inexperienced.

Other than that it includes a CD-ROM with tutorials, which are helpful. And there is quite a bit of information on Actionscript, to get you familiar with it.

It's a library of information on Flash MX, in which you can keep going back to for more books or videos, if you'd like to try your hand at some of the advanced tutorials for practice.

I'm extremely new to flash. I picked this book up about 10 days ago, and I can really say that if you've never worked with flash, give this book 10 days (off and on) and you'll start to see the possibilities. Which are really quite vast. I plan on picking up his next ActionScripting book as well, we'll see if he can stay on his game. But this book is a great teaching tool. I can't see flash pros using this because the pace of the book is relatively very slow. This is no 'crash course'. If your new to the world of flash, this book is the way to go.

My experience is that of a student who took a Flash MX course where, unfortunately, the assigned textbook was this horrible piece of junk. This has got to be the worst instructional book I have ever encountered! It is pretty clear from the first page that the author is very knowledgeable about the subject. I just wish that he would have worked on finding a better way of conveying his message instead of trying SO HARD to impress us with his vocabulary. He is not concise and his sentences are very long-winded. He repeats the same thing over and over again in a course of a paragraph. He spends the first page of every chapter telling us what we will be studying and what we will encounter in subsequent chapters, instead of just getting to the content (I do not want to spend my precious time reading about something that I will read about again later). There were many times I wanted to shout, "Get to the point!"

I enjoyed playing around with Flash, but this book has been so tedious and tiring to read. My fellow classmates expressed the same opinion in our class evaluations. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

While the book in itself is quite good, it seems to have forgotten that many Flash developers use Mac. All the screen shots are from the PC - and many of the examples on the CD did not work on my Mac OS X Powerbook (using Flash 6 player). The author spends a lot of time explaining the docked panel environment, forgetting (or at least not mentioning) that it is not available on the Mac version of Flash MX.

If you use a PC, however, go for it.

An author with a master's degree has the writing skill of a sophomore in high school. He uses the passive voice extensively, which makes understanding his instructions and recommendations difficult. A writer of a technical instruction piece should never use the passive voice because it is imprecise.
He pads sentences with unnecessary words, uses split infinitives, and uses adjectives such as "which" as sentence subjects.
He buries important points in long-winded sentences.
While some of the content is very good, its organization is poor, particularly the chapter on Introduction to Action Script.
Some of his exercises are useless. They merely instruct you to open a feature up in Flash and look at it.
The Flash Help system is much better than this book.

Note that even though it says 2-3 days shipping, and has for at least the last 2 weeks, the real shipping time is 4-6 weeks plus the week it takes them to get around to sending you that notice.

After trying to do an excerise in Chapter nine of this book 4 times, I threw this book in the trash and went to look for a better book. This book is a waste of time.
I even looked for a web site with a correction, no luck just more books to buy.