Customer Reviews

Macromedia Director Workshop

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4 star:		(1)
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2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book is a general overveiw that caught my eye to purchase because the author works and designs for Disney. I was expecting to see some great example on the CD;However, I was extremely dismayed. The examples on the CD shows how to make a basic portfolio. The book covers too much planning on a grand scale and doesn't show you quickly the steps to do something. read 5 pages and receive one answer. I wouldn't recommend the book

This was a great book for me, I am just getting started with Director and found the author easy to follow with just the right amount of detail. The information on using Director, coupled with a tutorial that you can follow throughout the book are great. I realize that Director can do much more than is laid out in this book, however, it is a great starting place.

If you are looking for a book to tell you about what director is capable of, then I guess this your book. This was one of the worst technical books I have ever read. The examples really don't teach you much of anything and the book doesn't show you how to do what it is talking about.

Director is already a useless piece of (), and those of us that are forced to use it have terrible documentation to use - then along comes this abomination. I'm sick of technical books that are steaming brain dumps from supposed "experts" in the field who are in fact some shaved monkey these here-today-gone-tomorrow technical publishers were able to coax into smashing out a few words for a box of snickers bars and a six pack of Bud Light. The simplistic examples in this book are good enough to get some high school kids going on their grade 10 science fair project to catalog and display their collection of Britney Spears .gif's, but if you actually need to do any work look elsewhere. Who is the intended audience for this piece of garbage? It sure isn't anyone who needs to use Director.

I happened upon this book in the bookstore because I noticed that it was on the shelf in an almost unsellable condition. The cover was worn and creased, the spine was cracked and it looked like the book had been picked up, pawed through and put back -- again and again! In the past, I had done some work with Director so I had a look (I didn't think ANYONE still used Director). I thought the book was slickly edited because it's so thin! Not too many thin technical books, I was hoping it was slickly edited and aimed at the Director programmer who needs only the info to get the job done. Not true!

There were lots of photos of dialog boxes interspaced with short descriptions, but there didn't seem to be a focus or emphasis on how to do a project, only simple examples with nothing to tie everything together. Director is good for making slide shows and that's about it, but there's something better than that: Powerpoint! (Alas, I guess it's good for Mac compatibility).

Since Director is a cluste#$?%@, it would have been nice if the book was retitled and shown how Director is not useful for much, so that it could finally be put to sleep. I noticed that the author used to work for Disney Interactive and I chuckled (I've seen some of DI's stuff lately and wondered why their quality has suffered, now I know why: they're using Director!). I hope the author didn't pen this book while he was working there, Disney is notoriously litigous when it comes to moonlighting and giving away "trade secrets" (Hey, Matt! Don't get caught!).

OK, so next time - make sure you have a specific audience, title it so, and go beyond simple examples and show us how not to rely on lingo and how to use Xtras and interface with C/C++. Show us how to do multimedia without a headache. Since Director has limitations, show us how to overcome them and then Director may have a life yet. It's still snappy if you want to do simple presentations, but we already know that.