Customer Reviews

Macromedia Flash MX 2004 for Windows & Macintosh

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I bought this book based on the outstanding reviews and now can only wonder if the author penned these reviews herself. This is a book written by a professional writer, not a Flash guru.

As I write this, I'm at the public library with a copy of Sam's Teach Yourself Flash 5 in 24 Hours and am amazed at how more superior the Sam's book is. For example, "symbols" is a core element of Flash, but after reading Katherine Ulrich's brief treatment of the topic I had entirely no understanding of the importance of symbols.

Conversely, the Sam book discussing the topic from 25 different angles. And more, throughout the Sam book all the questions I had after reading Ulrich's book get answered. Amazing, really. Time and again, those little mysteries that eluded me are brought to stage and completely dealt with in the Sam's book.

Basically, the Ulich Visual Quickstart describes all the things you see when you open start-up Flash -- Visual. But it shows you nothing about how to ochestrate all these tools to create something.

I spent two weeks with the Ulrich book and honestly can't even make a simple tween. Honestly, I can't!

To sum up, these folks behind this book need to serioulsy think about retiring their "visual quick start" method, at least for things as complex as Flash. I sususpect, there training authors in the Quick Start Method, handing them manuals when new products come out, and then giving them a week or two to punch out a new Quickstart Guide.

Finally, I'm not a whacko. I hate it when I see reviews like mine, but I believe every word I've written above.

ric landers

I'm a graphic design student in college and had to take a course that was heavy in flash programing. I had never really tackled flash, didn't know what it could, couldn't make sense of anything really. This was the book for our course and I can say it was well worth the money. This book is written simply, clearly, and for the beginner. It may not tell you how to do every advanced thing you can do with Flash, but it's a good place to start if you're a bit put-off by the Flash console and unsure of how to use it to tackle projects and presentations.

It isn't a book you can read from page one until the last. It's a guide, a good reference book. It's divided up into chapters, the first starting with the very basics and the last chapters going through how you can get your flash work uploaded online using various technology and programs. I pretty much learned how to use flash using this book, and in just four or five weeks, I'm making web-site style presentations, animating, making video presentations and all.

Every person that may be a designer or have to take-on Flash should pick up this book. It's easy to use, gives you little simple tasks you can do and breaks them down into numbered steps. It's not very wordy, and the chapters often times contains a little extra tip box if there's a question you're thinking of or if there's something a more advanced user may want to take on. Get this book!

I'm completely new to Flash MX and this book was a great introduction. As a total newbie I had to work through each chapter before I could move to the next. However, by the time I got to the end of the book I found that I had very good breadth of knowlege about Flash MX and was well prepared to move to more intermediate books. This is a great book to get you over Flash MX's big learning curve.

This is a very good book for those who want a reference book to see quickly how to do something. Sufficient depth to be helpful in learning but sufficiently clear to be easy to follow. This should not be the only book you get, but it should be the first one.

This book is essentially a REFERENCE book. It can be used to learn Flash, but only if you plan to set aside all of your free time for the next year to work through all of the lessons. It moves too slowly and most novice users will become bored and quit before they even learn how to use all of the drawing tools.

As a reference, it is indispensible. Need to know the difference between an animated graphic symbol and a movie clip? It's all explained in detail. I use this book as a quick reference whenever I need to know how to do something. I can usually find it in here and implement it within 20 minutes (rather than working through a long tutorial).

My only complaint about this book is that it is basically a revised edition of a book that was written for an early version of Flash. The editors do a pretty good job of updating the sections, but I have found that some eccentricities of Flash are not covered. For example, if you use the color mixer to do a color change (motion) tween, it won't work. The book does not tell you that you need to change the colors through the property inspector. These sorts of things can occasionally lead to hours of frustration.

I would have to say that this is the best Flash REFERENCE on the market, but it isn't perfect. I would not recommend working through the chapters sequentially (like a tutorial) because it is too slow.

If you want to try and learn Flash MX 2004 from scratch, go get this book. It will help you to get to intermediate level fast and with ease especially if you have a good knowledge in image editing. I guess, first few chapters will be too basic for you. You may just skip chapters that you think you're already armed with, just like what i did (skipping half of the book's pages), but with no regrets. After all, learning flash is what I'm after with. And besides, I haven't completed reading the book yet.

My brother is learning the book also, but the difference is, he has no knowledge in image editing at all and he's really enjoying learning from the book. He has it 5 stars, I have it 4 stars by a few chapters. We're still trying to learn remaining chapters of the book that would determine the deciding factor.

This VQS book gives a great high-level of a broad spectrum of functionality of Flash but does not go into much detail. Good starter book.

Adobe and Macromedia both write excellent software but both have two things in common - the lack of being user friendly and intuitive.
This book is a boon to those who are willing to put the time in to learn Flash MX 2004. The explanations are clear and the examples allow a user to actually create Flash projects rather than just reading about them.
Flash, itself, is a monsterous program, and so the book cannot cover everything - Flash scripting for instance is only touched on lightly but if you are looking for a book that will give you a solid beginning, this is a good place to start.

If you want a reference manuel for learning Flash I can't think of a better format than the one established by the Visual Quickstart Guide.

I've recently read six Flash books and this was the only one NOT specifically about coding games. This is for the 'designer' or non coding-types ^_^ And although initially I didn't really like it because I knew instead of following step 1, step 2, step 3, etc. I'd be writing events in ActionScript2 to move that movieclip around...I later after reading the other books had to look something up in this book and learned to appreciate it a bit more! :D

Worth the read even for programmers!