Customer Reviews

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Hands-On Training

5 star:		(30)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book covers every basic to intermediate topic I can think of in Flash 8 Professional. It assumes no knowledge of Flash 8 at all and gives a great overall explanation of Flash in general and what it can be used for. It also is a great book for people who have used Flash in the past but want a refersher course on what new things are available in the lastest version of Flash.

The book starts out in Chapter 2 in describing the Flash environment and every area such as the toolbox, timeline, layer controls, panel sets, keyboard shortcuts, and customizing your environment. The next chapter goes through many well documented exercises in showing the reader how to use the many drawing and selection tools in the toolbox (pen, pencil, brush, shape tools, ink bottle, transform tool, eraser, etc.).

The fourth chapter goes into animation basics in explaining very succinctly all the parts of the timeline and how it is used in animation. The chapter is very important because if you do not understand the timeline and how to use it correctly you will never really understand Flash. The author does a great job in this especially since this a very visual topic and many illustrations and screenshots are used to help the reader visualize what he is trying to explain. The next chapter contnues with animation and talks about shape tweening.

Chapter 6,7,8 focus on symbols and how they are used in other types of animation (motion-tweening) and a new feature in Flash 8 called filter and blend modes (very powerful).

Chapter 9,10,11 focus on the other 2 types of symbols which are button and movieclips. Button symbols allow for interaction between the Flash movie you create and the viewer. Movieclips allow for interaction as well and add alot of more powerful features with ActionScript that is explained in full detail in Chapter 12 and 13. The author has some great examples in those chapters with buttons and movieclips. These are two other importat topics in understanding Flash.

The rest of the book 12-16 focus on some intermediate topics such as ActionScripting, adding sound and video, using components with Flash. These require a little coding practice, but the authore goes very slowing and in great detail explaining these issues so the beginner does not get lost at all.

The final chapter (17) reviews publishing which shows the reader how to get their flash movies on the web.

A great overall book for the Flash beginner or someone who wants to refresh their skills on the latest Flash version (8).

Also, the book includes a 24-hour pass to Lynda.com, which is a fantastic site that has tons and tons of great video tutorials on many topics like Flash and other Macromedia products as well.

The book is worth every penny and then some...

I almost gave this book 3 stars, but realized that it was just 3 based on my flawed expectations for the book. I had been looking for a good introduction to flash with an eye towards the capabilites of actionscript. Sadly, the action script section of the book was very short and very basic - really just giving you the basics of using the wizard to perform rudimentary tasks. But, the book never professed to offer any great actionscript insights, so, there's that.

As an introduction this book is very good, especially for the beginner. This offers step by step on how to do perform many of the tasks in flash. At times, I think, it's a little too basic, but that may just be me (for example every time they ask you to hit return they say Press Enter (for windows) or Return (for mac) throughout the whole book). But it doesn't really take away from the book.

Everything is very clearly presented, tools are explained, I was impressed that they made very pointed use of keyboard shortcuts. They gave screen shots and images to illustrate most steps which is very helpful in a book like this. The book covers the basics, using the drawing tools, tweening, buttons, movies, importing various media including video.

Each chapter begins with a half page overview, then another page or three of deeper coverage and then several step by step exercises. Most of these are very focused exercises, relying on the provided cd's different pre-made projects to start you off at a point where you can focus on the task at hand. Strewn throughout the exercises are tips and more explanatory text when a subject warrants a half page or page more of description.

I found the book good at presenting a top level view of flash. I suspect that it will not be a book that I go back to frequently as the organization by project doesn't lend itself to convenient referencing. But that's a trade off, great books for reference are very rarely good introductory books. So overall, I'm pretty satisfied that this book achieved what it set out to do.

If you are trying to learn flash for the first time it is crucial that a tutorial focus on the essentials. Most beginners need to get a feel for the common progression of using such a complex program. This book fails to answer the burning question; How is this program used in the real world.

The progression of build a flash project from start to finish is not defined based on the order of topics covered in this book.
Instead you have topics that are randomly layed out. Not enough screenshots were presented for key topics such as tweening (the heart of flash). This book seems more of a continuation of the previous version which ,by the way, has exercises that were from the previous version of the book written by Roseanna Yeung. Come on Lynda.com! How about more creativity?!?!?!? This is Flash.

If you want a really good book that lays out the basics clearly andstraight to the point...check out "The Focal Easy guide to Macromedia Flash 8" by Birgitta Hosea.

I spent half a day reviewing every single flash book on the shelf and the aforementioned one made my cut. I was intent on getting Macromedia's Flash 8 training from the source but that book is a nightmare.

This book isnt bad but I wouldn't want to learn using this book if I were completely new to Flash 8.

Gonzalez's "Flash Professional 8" underscores a deficiency common to many Flash instructional texts, where they spend half the book examining very basic subjects such as timeline-based animation and drawing tools. Granted, this book does a nice job illustrating some basics to flash, but the level of discourse here does not inspire conceptual creativity. Good books should lead to greater things, and not simply review the same basic subjects discussed since Flash 4. One reason why books like this exist is that Flash is poorly documented out of the box. Yet any decent used book on Flash MX will upstage this one.

While this book may lack instructional spirit, the most glaring omission is found in its Actionscript chapter. Ever since MX, the emphasis behind Flash has been the power and flexibility of Actionscript. Granted, Actionscript has become rather complicated, but a good author should at least prime the reader to the coding power available in Flash 8. Instead, we're treated to a weak smattering of script usage, without touching on the real power behind flash today: classes and object-oriented structure. As if that deficiency weren't glaring enough, the author provided examples of button coding that were outdated since Flash 5! There is no excuse for such weak writing. You the reader deserve a better challenge to expand and hone your Flash skills.

I'm giving this book special scrutiny because Lynda Weinman's textbooks have such visibility and apparent acclaim. While her books may be well marketed, they aren't always the best use of your money--or time spent reading. Let me suggest a few texts which I have read personally and can recommend. If you want a good beginner guide, check out Russell Chun's "Visual QuickPro" Flash books. More inspiring, project-related books are found under the Friends of Ed publishing line by Sham Bhangal. The most detailed and authoritative books I've read are Colin Moock's Definitive Guides, the other texts by O'Reilly, especially those which touch on OOP in detail. The last ones are tough at first, but they really open you up the power of Flash. And that in-depth Actionscript power is what your future employers will be looking for. Good luck.

If you are a fan of the hands-on-training (H O T) books series (as I am) you might tend to be disappointed in this particular one. Indeed it is the least effective of all of the hands-on-training series books I have used.

A novice to Flash, I had used the H O T series books with great effectiveness, in particular the entire Dreamweaver H O T series from DW3 on up. I therefore figured that H O T was the way to go to bootstrap myself into Flash. This did not prove to be the case. Unlike other beginner's level H O T books this one seems to be uncomfortable with issues such as its level of approach and depth. It hangs somewhere between giving you the constant feeling that it is being dumbed down for you on one hand and that Flash is really too complicated to be taught to you on the other. The publisher's own Beginner AND Intermediate level rating is an accurate tip off.

As a teacher I know that if I go into a classroom (even on a topic I know stone cold) still unsure of how I am going to approach a topic, there is a good chance of an ineffective classroom experience. This author undoubted knows Flash; he simply doesn't know how to teach it well in this format.

Instead of using the Gonzalez book I dropped back to the Flash 5 Hands-on Training by Kymberlee Weil book of the same series. The book was just great, everything the Gonzalez book was not. It was classic H O T learn by doing, step by step, instruction. At two chapters a day, in a little more than a week I was up-to-speed despite having to spend the extra time bridging the differences between a Flash 5 book and the Flash 8 Professional application.

So if you are buying this book based on past positive experiences with the H O T series, beware!

Length:: 6:12 Mins

Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Hands-On Training (Softcover)

I got this book for a course that I was taking on Flash. It is a great book and I am happy the teacher recommended it.

The chapters are arranged in easy to follow exercises that teach all the basics of Flash. I really liked this style of teaching because it forces you to open up Flash and do the exercises. Much more useful than a book that you just sit and read.

The author of the book is also very good about telling you multiple ways of doing something. In the course of the exercises there are little colored boxes that will talk about how you could have done the above action this way or this way or this way. The fact that these tips are usually separate is nice if you don't care and want to skip the additional information.

So far I am about 3/4 the way through the course and the book and have been very happy with it. A great book; especially for a newbie that doesn't have any programming background.

I was building a website, and wanted to add a Flash slideshow to it, but had no idea how to do that. I used the Flash tutorials that came with the program, but they were somewhat lacking in detail. I ordered this book from Amazon, and two days later it was at my door. I used the book from page 1, performed all of the easy to understand exercises, watched the included videos, and by the end of the month I was able to finish programming my website and publish it on the internet. This book made understanding Flash a breeze; I couldn't have completed my website to my satisfaction without it. [...].

Just wanted to say that I bought this book with no prior experience with Flash or Studio 8. I found the various modules of Studio 8 confusing so I decided to concentrate on just one and that being Flash 8. Hands on Training is the way to go. Gonzalez made learning the program easy. However, after going through the book, remember that you have to do your part too. Practice! Practice! Practice! Just reading the book or any book for that matter and then putting it on the shelf won't do you any good. Very happy with this book and will buy more HOT titles in the future.

hi:
This book is one the best books I have seen so far on detail, information and straight to the point. This author: James Gonzalez, knows how to explain and put it on simple terms a complicated task.. My congratulations to him and the editing personnel. The only thing is that they need to put a little bit more glue betwen pages because is fallen apart. Other than that is the best.
JOSE