Customer Reviews

Macromedia Flash 8 ActionScript: Training from the Source

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

 

 

This book was required text for a programming class I am taking. After trying to learn AS thru books and on line I finally found a live teacher. He assigns us excercises in this book. Yes, they are frustrating because often times they don't work. It is a good thing there is a disc with the completed versions included so you can troubleshoot the problems. I have found the completed code sometimes differs from the code given in the text. Learning often comes from what goes wrong instead of what goes right. If you read the previous reviews you see the book is either too simple or too complex. The excercises here are made to get you exposed to what you can do with action script. I think it accomplishes that even tho it is frustrating.

In general, I have struggled with 'TRC' books . They have been excruciatingly painful for me to work through with their mindless follow the instucrtions formats where you don't get to think on your own, you just fiollow the

instructions and what you learn is that you know how to follow instructions.

Because sometimes here you have to use your own logic to get it right, you are forced to learn how to use actionscript. I gave it 3 stars even tho some lessons take simple concepts and make them unecessarily complicated. I liked some of the excercises and since it was a required text I was happy it wasn't a build one project type of book.

There are many examples given that do NOT work before getting to something that does work. Each is explained as if it will work.

Obviously the sourse has been talking to himself too long and has no idea how to teach this information to someone who dosen't all ready know actionscript.

It's interesting that the book has been panned by experienced Flash programmers. I'm a new Flash developer with previous development experience in other development systems. An expert Flash developer recommended the Training From the Source books. This is my first, and I doubt I'll waste any money on another.

I spent an entire afternoon on lesson 1, the most basic exercise. I did the "Answering Machine" exercise about a dozen times, assuming I was doing something wrong, and was just on the learning curve. The book doesn't show you what the solution should look like. However, there is a file of the solution on the disc.

That didn't work either. I couldn't believe they hadn't tested the solution to lesson 1, so I started debugging my environment, making sure I had the latest flash player, and testing it on other computer systems. Then I checked the Peachpit website referenced in the book to see whether there was any errata explaining the problem and hopefully providing an alternative download so I could see how it was supposed to have been developed. Nope. If it was there, a search on "errata" the author's names, the book title, and various other keyword combinations failed to find it.

The other reviews on Amazon confirmed my worst fears: the hands-on exercises - even the solutions - don't work. I'd rather learn by debugging my own code than waste my time on debugging exercises in a book I paid money for.

It's pretty pathetic when Lesson 1 wasn't tested. I guess the authors were too busy being game development heroes or geniuses to bother checking the crap they produced. Message to Jobe Makar and Danny Patterson: nobody who wastes their readers' time and money is cool. Don't blame QA - you wrote it.

I am not excited about potentially wasting time on lesson 2. I feel I was ripped off of a lot of money for this book. Save your money: don't buy it, and don't assume any of the other Training From the Source Books are a good use of your time or money either.

I was hoping for a different slant on this material from the previous book but with the exception of a couple Flash 8 specific examples, this is either exactly the same as Actionscript for Flash MX 2004 or worse, with not as much detail. Waste of money.

Bought this book because i really hate using the built in help features of any program and really wanted to learn this, but i am 30 pages in and its already full of errors. The projects that are supposedly finished on the cd are wrong and there is no on-line site for this book so i can't find any type of updates at all. If you really need/want this book buy it used because the authors obviously don't need the $$ since they didn't proofread their own work.

As other reviewers have stated, the exercises in this book DO NOT WORK!!!

You'll be ready to pull your hair out by the second chapter!

I followed the direction over and over and over again, thinking I was doing something wrong. It wasn't me! The book is WRONG!

This is a book teaching you how to learn a -ing programming language and it's like nobody actually read it after they wrote it! How is it possible that Macromedia and Peachpit let this book be published!??

If this is what "Training from the Source" means, then I'll learn elsewhere.

C'mon people! Test your product before you try to sell it to the public for 45 bucks!!!!

Book appears rushed, incomplete, and at times translated from another language. Consider this sentence:

"When the user clicks on the target movie clip, call the onPress() method of DraggableRectangle"

Obviously, something, possibly an article -- "it" is missing from the second clause. To someone with intermediate familiarity with AS, this omission is easily negotiated but to a beginner, it could be a major hurdle.

If you can tolerate and survive mistakes like the aforementioned, this book is actually a qualified "not bad" intermediate book. Unfortunately, there isn't sufficient sophistication or depth to really move your work to the next level. You'll learn a few things but this book will probably not remain on your shelf as an essential reference to AS once completed.

Well, I don't have any intention to convince you to buy this book, but if you are not a lazy person, and need to learn something solid from the root, that's the book for you. I already tried some books which orient us to buit a whole website as a project. But when we try to built our sites, using our ideas, they don't work, just because we have to do something different than theirs, escaping one line out from their recipes that they gave us, and most of these books don't cover everything that we need. Stop with that. Learn actionscript as a challange, not as a cake recipe.

I knew something was wrong with this book when I was only on pg 14. It showed an image of the toolbar and some of the tools on it had transversed label names. Obviously the editors and the proofreaderf and the writers were out on a long lunch when that happened. In actionscipting, the coding depends on your the attention to detail. The spacing, the uppercase vs lowercase. Anyway, point being. Some of the test book lessons did not match up with the final lessons on the cd rom. Some code was out of it's place, the book indicated it went in the end, when in reality it went in the middle and I also noticed that their spacing in various methods and functions rendered the code non-functionable. On the disk, the spacing was VERY different. I am an art director who justw anted to brush up on action scrippting during my vacation (yes my vacation). I swear I am considering sending a bill for my wasted time and frustration to Jobe and Danny. I am livid. THANK GOD ADOBE BOUGHT OUT FLASH. Macromedia (Jobe and Danny that means you) should not be allowed to write books ever again. The only happy ending to this story is that I can possibly write this book off at tax time and get my money back. Very disapointed and frustrated.

if you are a flash developer/designer who is comfortable with the basics of flash and actionscript, this book is awesome. confusing topics like listeners and the delegate class are covered well. i really liked this book and recommend it - i've recently recommended it to my brother because i think he understands arrays and for loops and xml, etc but would like to get a better handle on it, he's going to like this book as well.

fyi i also had Jobe Makar's game book(green cover) and liked that as well.