Macromedia Flash 8: Training from the Source [Paperback]

James English (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321336291 | ISBN-13: 978-0321336293 | Publication Date: October 28, 2005

What began life as a simple Web animation tool has evolved into a powerful platform for Web application development—which means that if you’re serious about developing for the Web, you need to get serious about learning Flash. With its breakthrough motion-graphics capabilities and powerful run-time effects, Flash 8 provides the tools, authoring power, and rich video capabilities you need to provide stunning interactive content. This Macromedia-certified guide provides the key to learning the basics of Flash 8. Through a series of hands-on projects, master trainer James English provides a firm foundation in everything Flash—from graphics, animation, and video to ActionScript fundamentals. Simple step-by-step instructions and tons of screenshots guide you through the process of creating buttons and links, drawing and animating in Flash, formatting text, adding video and sound, loading data, and more—in short, everything you need to develop sophisticated, professional-looking Web sites. A companion CD includes the lesson files needed to complete the book’s projects as well as a trial version of the program itself.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

James H. English is the Director of the Learning Center at Motion Over Time in New York City, where he trains people to use Flash, Dreamweaver and pretty much anything Macromedia. He also occasionally consults on development projects for clients past and present. James is also the author of Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Certified Designer Study Guide, from Macromedia Press.

Product Details

• Paperback: 416 pages
• Publisher: Macromedia Press (October 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321336291
• ISBN-13: 978-0321336293
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,595,584 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Basicly, a good tutorial with some flaws, February 2, 2006

By 

korlo (Clinton Twp, MI) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Macromedia Flash 8: Training from the Source (Paperback)

This book is very good and, at the same time, illogical and frustrating. Though it does do a great job of walking the reader through the step by step tutorials, it does so with a somewhat confusing approach.
The book sets out to do something that most Flash tutorial books avoid - creating a complete web site. Many books are focused on the neat tricks you can do with Flash or the usage of ActionScript to push the program to it's limits. These types of books are useful and fun, but learning to put all that together into a cohesive whole is left to the readers skills and imagination.
This book fills that much needed gap between learning a few basic tricks and making something useful from them.
On the plus side - the book has a nice feature where each step is first summarized in one to two sentences and then explained more fully. As your skills and knowledge progress, you can pretty much just read the basic steps without getting bogged down with the details. Anyone wishing to know a little more about the current steps can read the whole of the text to get a very detailed explanation.
However, the approach to the finished project - a complete web site written in Flash - leaves much to be desired.
As the book uses the approach of starting with the most basic functions and ideas and then building on them (a great approach for any tutorial book), that's where things start to fall apart. In the first few chapters you will create some basic shapes and buttons with the intention of animating or programming the functionality in later chapters (as the lessons become more in depth). However, some of the steps for completing a portion of the site may touch on chapters separated throughout the book. As an example - creating a dropdown menu: You create the some of the graphics in chapter 1 or 2. Then in chapter 3 you add more graphics/options. And finally in chapter 5, you add some programming functionality, but only to the menu not to the main page of the site. That doesn't come until later in chapter 7. Of course, throughout the chapters you are also working on bits of this and parts of that so by the time you get it all together, you've forgotten how you got there.
I think the book still serves a great purpose - creating a complete site with Flash. Because of this, my opinion leans a little more to the positive that the negative. The skipping around from chapter to chapter adds a little frustration. But in the end, the book still accomplishes something useful and interesting.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Book full of errors and inconsistencies, missing data on CD, May 4, 2006

By 

H. Cheng (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Macromedia Flash 8: Training from the Source (Paperback)

This book has a good idea, i.e., create a Flash site and teach you Flash while doing it. But I feel like the editor/proofreader didn't do a good job. There're so many errors in the book it's ridiculous. It's extremely frustrating when you stumble upon a problem and you have to figure out whether it's because you didn't follow instructions or because the book messed up.

For example, there's one time when the instruction says we'll add an ActionScript to a Back button in the next exercise. But when you get to the next lesson, the Back button was NOT mentioned at all. So when you test the file, the Back button Will NOT work. I fixed the problem by adding my own ActionScript based on what I've learned so far. But this should not happen in an instruction book, esp. one geared towards beginners.

Other error types include inconsistencies between the written instruction and the screenshots (i.e. the written instruction says one thing, but the screenshot shows something else). Some of the errors are so obvious since the instructions and the screenshots are on the same page!

Also, the entire files for Lesson 6 are MISSING from the CD-ROM, also missing were files from other lessons. I don't understand how could Peachpit Press not catch that mistake?

I also tried to access the book's forum looking for help. And every time I do that, some kind of script would run, the computer would claim there's a virus and freezes up. So I couldn't access the forum. Well, not so surprising considering how author wrote the book. Duh! I tried this on multiple computers. So it's not a computer related issue.

All in all, way overpriced product with low quality. It's better to spend your money on a book that actually have correct instructions. Look elsewhere for a better Flash book, that's what I'm doing now.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Missing Files, Typos, and Outright Mistakes Make This Book Frustrating, May 13, 2006

By 

H. Autry (Tennessee) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Macromedia Flash 8: Training from the Source (Paperback)

...

I just got to lesson six, I go to open the CD and copy the files the book says to grab, and there IS no "Lesson 6" folder on the CD! How can this happen? I have already became pretty frustrated with the book trying to deal with the countless errors and typos that should have been caught by the editor.

It does walk you through the process of building a site. I am only half way through the book at this point and I have learned a bit about Flash, but I have to guess that there is a much better book out there to learn from that isn't plagued by all the missing information and inconsistencies in this book.

I chose this book because it was the official training guide, but Macromedia should be ashamed to have their name attached to this book. I wish I would have went a different route at this point...

--------------------
Update: I finished this book last night. The shortcomings that brought me to Amazon to write this review continued to pile up.

I found the chapter on ActionScript particularly lacking. In my opinion, you shouldn't have to debug the code written in the book to get the lesson to work properly (this happened in more than one exercise in the ActionScript chapter).

The only reason I give this title two stars instead of one, is that after forcing myself to push through the book I do have a slightly better understanding of how flash works.

I would say that using this book to learn Flash is like mowing your yard with a hedge trimmer:

1) It takes a long time (a 3 hour lesson took more like 6-8 with all the errors not captured in editing, YMMV)
2) Your extremely tired of it when you are finished
3) You are ready to invest in a new mower before you are half way done... (I am starting on Flash Professional 8 - Hands on Training - by James Gonzalez now, and it is looking pretty good so far...)

- J