Customer Reviews

Flash 3 Web Animation F/X and Design

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

I'm a new user to Flash and for the most part the book put me in a coma when I tried to follow the examples (drawing tutorial was particularly painful to get through). The online tutorials and lessons provided by Macromedia are so much more helpful. I personally think this book should have been recalled because of the missing tutorial files. Author should at least post a url where we can download the missing files. Sorry for being so critical but that book cost too much to ignore the flaws. A nice looking cover design and some eye catching color page inserts probably tricked a lot of shoppers into taking this book home. Too bad the content wasn't better thought out.

When I first saw this book I was very excited. Flash books are hard to come by, so I picked this up. Was I disappointed! First of all none of the tutorial files are on the CD. What a joke, this is an integral part of the learning process. Secondly things are explained in the most backwards manner. The beginning of the book goes into detail about all sorts of Flash features. After reading all of this information, we finally get to the meat of the application by Chapter 4. Here lessons are not explained easily. Either your going back to find out how to do something or looking ahead. Did anybody take the time to edit this rag. I bought the book as a substitute for a dry, boring manual. Instead the manual is clear and concise. I later started searching around the internet and found tutorials that taught you more in a few sentences then chapters in this book. This book never looks at the big picture. "How do I piece everything together once I've learned the lessons." Save your money. There are excellent Flash tutorials on-line that are 100 times better and free.

If you're NEW to Flash, this is a great book. For those of you that know NOTHING about Flash, but want to learn... this is probably the best book on Flash out there. If you're already fluent in Flash, don't waste your time, and anyway, if you're that fluent, why do you need a book? Use your imagination when it comes to designing and programming!

I dug this book a lot, being a newcomer to Flash. I've read a bunch of Milburn's books and his many magazine articles, and I think he's a good writer. I don't know where these other reviews are coming from. They look suspiciously like they are from the same person. If you want to make an objective decision about whether to buy this book, here's my take. Buy it if you're new to vector graphics or animation. It's considerably more patient and detailed than the on-line tutorials. Don't buy it if you're an experienced Flasher who's been working with the program since its inception. Flash is a simple program compared to most graphics applications. Practice every day and you'll start inventing stylistic "tricks" and putting together new combinations of elements. The negative reviews you see here also clump together in a batch every time someone posts a positive review. It really looks to me like the idea is to push the positive reviews from the active part of the Web page and to make sure that there are enough of them to lower the average ratings.

The missing contents from the CD is a major flaw. I spent far too much time drawing the graphics in Flash then actually following instruction from the book. Though drawing the clip arts did help establish some skill in the drawing tools of flash.

However, the instructions were sub-par. I felt as if several steps were missing and the explanations were not clear. Many of the instructions were repetitive.

I've already gone through one basic flash book. The alluring graphics in the cover and pages made it seem like I can take a step up to at least the intermediate level (the type of step one could use to get a job! ) Unfortunately, it did not.

Sorry, I'm glad I borrowed this book from a friend rather than buying it.

Since Macromedia allready have the best manuals I have encountered books on the subject have to be extremly good to be of any use. This wasnet the case with this book but rather it made me look at flash from another poit of view. It helped me and gave me a fresh go in my design.

First of all, you people here giving this book a one star for the missing tutorials is not good at all. He does a awesome job of explaining flash to a beginner/intermediate flash user. WHO TOLD YOU TO BUY THIS BOOK IF YOU WERE AN EXPERT? Anyways, even if the tutorials and things were missing, you could've still downloaded it from the website!! As Ken Milburn said, he did not intend to do it and made an error. But, this book was excellent in my opinion and i think you should buy this book.

I don't understand why so many people are putting this book down. A week ago I hadn't even touched Flash. I bought this book and by the weekend had my own website done ENTIRELY using Flash 4. And now I'm getting more work than I can handle because I have this skill. For someone who knows nothing about Flash, this is a really good book!

I needed to learn Flash quick, so rushed out and found only this book. It was quite a disappointment. I felt it dwelled far too much on drawing in Flash. I actually spent half a day playing with Flash and learnt more than I ever could than if I learnt from this book. Also as other people have mentioned, the CD was awful...I couldn't find the turorial files anywhere.

If you complete the online tutorials you have covered all the information in this book. I found the only useful thing in this book was the limited sample links. These showed me what others have done and what is already out there, but if you are interested in seeing some really cool sites just visit the Macromedia web site for links. If you learn the tutorials and have any creativity and vision you dont need this book