Customer Reviews

Flash.NET - Dynamic Content for Designers with Flash Remoting MX and ASP.NET

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

 

 

This book is divided between accounts of ASP.NET and databases, and their integration with Flash movies. First of all, this is not a book for beginners. You need a reasonable amount of IT under your belt to take advantage of the content. In short you need to know something about programming to pick up the threads in the text.

I found the examples interesting and the last two case studies are quite well elaborated. I found PenPad particularly interesting. The code is downloadable from the authors' website and that makes up forthe lack of a CD (just about).

Throughout the book the authors use C# as the server scripting lanaguage which surprised me. You won't learn C# from thisbook and I suspect that without some background reading, the scripts will seem meaningless.

The database examples (using pubs2) are fairly standard, but again there is the unwritten assumption that you know something about these artefacts anyway. If you don't have a few undergrad CS course under your belt, the two chapters on databases will lose your interest very quickly. The flash elemetns are really introduced to illustrate principles (which I was happy with) rather than develop red hot applications.

Overall, I was pleased with the book. It fills a gap between the traditional programmer and the web designer. The examples are good and reasonably developed.

If I have any reservations, it is that the authors rarely take the time to develop a design before presenting code snippets. Personally I dislike this approach intensely. I find many students unable to decouple their designs from pieces of code and it encourages bad software engineering practices. there is no excuse in a data processing textbook for not throwing up half a dozen flow charts to give a flavour of the control logic. That point being made, I would certainly recommend this book to any reasonably experienced programmer, but not to a beginner.

This book is a great reference for both server side coders and the more flash orientated.

I used this book while migrating our site from classic asp to ASP.Net and didn't have a clue about flash design. This book shows you everything from interacting with web services using flash to using flash to make online drawing apps!!

I would recommend this book to anybody wanting to learn either of these technologies!

A bunch of quasi-authors get together to write a book that ends up being less than useful because one hand doesn't know what the other is doing. Some sections are better than others, but the overall result is still quite poor. Full of errata, mistakes, oversights, and shoddy editing - stay away from this book unless you find it at the deep discount bin for next to nothing.

I hope these guys learn a lesson (whoever runs these books now) and learn not to hire a whole slew of article writers to make a book. They're almost never good this way.

I spent quite some time mark down the errata and tried to get the code to work. It turned out that the original code was working after cleaned up some typos, while the one in the errata did not work at all. The Clock example in page 29 is one.
The jokes example in Chapter 2 got another problem. Something is missing and code did not work. No errata for this one on support site. May be the other review is right - this book is not for beginners.

I spent quite some time mark down the errata and tried to get the code to work. It turned out that the original code was working after cleaned up some typos, while the one in the errata did not work at all. The Clock example in page 29 is one.
The jokes example in Chapter 2 got another problem. Something is missing and code did not work. No errata for this one on support site. May be the other review is right - this book is not for beginners.

This is by far the best text I have seen. Bizzell and company obviously have a strong grasp of the material and are able to communicate it in an easy to understand, laid back style. I would recommend this title to anyone that wants to get a leg up on Flash and .Net....

The first example that is shown in this book does not work... I have tried everything and cannot get it to work... So that leaves me to believe I will be wasting my time if I continue. I actually decided to build my application with Cold Fusion MX and Flash MX instead of .Net and Flash. When I first got the book there was no supporting code on the website even available .. but when I checked again the code was there for the download.. but I am going to try Cold Fusion now since I was so frustrated with the example - line by line .. that did not work. He did not give very clear directions. He did not tell you "in the first frame in the Action Layer insert the following.. he assumed you knew that I guess.. I tried it every possible way and still could not get it to work...