Customer Reviews

Macromedia Flash 8: Training from the Source

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

 

 

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.

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.

...

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...

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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

Flash is one of those technologies that's like a black box to me. I'm not good with graphics, and I really don't know how people produce those Flash animations on the web. But a recent review copy of Macromedia Flash 8 Training from the Source by James English might actually allow me to understand the basics...

Contents: Learning the Basics; Creating Graphics; Using Text; Creating and Editing Symbols; Creating Animations; Adding Basic Interactivity; Adding Sound and Video; Creating Forms Using Components; Learning ActionScript Basics; Loading and Optimizing Flash Content; Publishing Flash Documents; Installing Extensions; Resources; Keyboard Shortcuts; Index

English takes the reader through eleven chapters that cover all the basic tasks and functions within Flash. The book comes with a trial copy of Macromedia Flash 8, so it's not like to have to spend hundreds of dollars before you can even use the book. The material is very much a step-by-step approach, with all the sample files included. The target project is creating a bookstore site, so all the exercises build on one another so that you have a finished project by the time you're done. The layout of the chapters is very nicely done, also. You're told what the chapter will cover, what you will learn, how long it should take, and what lesson files you'll need from the CD. At the end, there's a recap telling you what you *have* learned so that it's all reinforced. Each "do this" step is followed by a brief commentary on what is happening as well as any tips that might be useful to you. All in all, I can see that 15 or so hours spent with this book would definitely demystify the whole Flash concept. It doesn't mean I'm switching careers, mind you, but at least there's one less black hole in my knowledge landscape... :)

Macromedia Flash professional 8 training from the Source is a member of the training from the source series that lets you learn by example. The book is good for beginners that need to know about Flash. In the beginning, Tom Green and Jordan L. Chilcott introduce Flash interface and walk through the program features with some useful example for better understanding for the program and its features.

For sure, it is not useful if you want to go deeper and more advanced in the program, but it is still a very good start. This book is also a very useful resource for the Flash certification exam beside the study guide.

I agree with what others have said. The book starts out ok - although I do feel like the author sort of breezes over things and skips steps. I found that for several exercises I sort of had to figure things out on my own. Even though the book claims to be for people who have no background in these type of programs, I feel that the author assumes that readers have more knowledge than they actually do.

The ActionScript chapter is a disaster in my opinion. Now, I understand that a thorough explanation of ActionScript is beyond the scope of this book; however, the author neglects to appropriately explain the code! It almost seems as if he's gotten lazy by this point in the book.

Don't get me wrong, I have learned a lot about Flash by reading this book - it's just that a lot of the learning I had to do on my own because the book was frequently inaccurate or did a shoddy job of explaining things.

As others have said, there are a lot of typos too. I wouldn't really recommend this book unless maybe you have a little background in the program.

I'm a recent convert to Flash 8 Professional, so my interest in the Flash 8 Training from the Source book was high in the beginning. The book is well-crafted, written especially for a beginner, and I find that, in some cases, I can move among the lessons to grab just what I need for two time-intense projects I've been working on.

The first project I wanted help with was the opening sequence to the Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee Astrobiology Initiative's website (http://www.indiana.edu/~deeplife). For the IPTAI website opening I needed to import a Quicktime (QT) movie that I had composed in After Effects. It took several tries, but I finally figured out that if I imported it as a movie clip and separated the audio, Flash put the video and the audio on their own timelines. That way I could sync the audio (as much as possible) to the video and add actions to the video on another timeline. It's a clumsy way of working, but for this short sequence and looping audio, it's ok. I wouldn't try it if I needed precise sync, I'd try something else (not sure what).

The second project is another QT After Effects animation without sound. I imported it as progressive download and with that choice I could embed cue points and link them to navigation so people can choose which parts of the animation they want to see. Flash 8 Pro also has a collection of pre-made skins to choose from which made the project a lot easier. The buttons are already programmed to start, stop, pause, and go to the cue points.

The first project was very successful, but I didn't rely heavily on the book's tutorials because I was using the video import capabilities in Flash 8 Pro and the book doesn't address those. The second project is a bit more challenging. As I write this I am cruising through the tutorials trying to find relevant examples for embedding video and adding components with behaviors. What I am finding are incomplete lessons with the hope of more suitable information later on somewhere in the book. I'm pretty sure I can get what I need to complete this project from the help menu in Flash 8 Pro rather than from Training from the Source: it will take some time to work through the lessons for what I'm certain will be a valuable exercise.

The book speaks to beginners like me in a tone that isn't belittling so I am encouraged to explore further and seek my own resources where the book is lacking. The book is definitely worth buying and working through. I am not a programmer by any stretch, so I appreciate tutorials that assume I do not speak geek.

~Ruth Droppo

The book is well written and very cheap but you get what you pay for. If you are using an older version of Flash it's fine but for Adobe CS4-CS5 you'll want a newer book.

The typos and inconsistencies in this book are ridiculous and frustrating. In the very FIRST lesson you create a file called "Test.fla". A few pages later in the SAME lesson you're told to open "LabCom.fla", which the book says "...is the document you created in the first part of this lesson." What the...??? You never created any such file!! And, of course, you assume you've done something wrong and start scrambling back through the lesson to see how you missed creating this file. The "LabCom.fla" is on the CD but it's the completed project file. So the remaining instructions telling you how to add various elements and perform different tasks have already been done. Yes, you quickly figure out that you should use your "Test.fla" to complete the lesson, but it's jarring to have your learning process interrupted by silly mistakes (yes, there are more) that should not exist in a book claiming to be "training from the source."

I will not buy another "Macromedia Training from the Source" title. Unfortunately, I already purchased "Training from the Source" for Flash8 ActionScript. I hope I didn't waste more money on another poorly written product.