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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Same ol stuff, July 26, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: New Masters of Flash: The 2002 Annual (Paperback)
I bought this book because I liked the last version and this one was going to deal with Flash 5. It's a real pretty book and the CD is real nice, but the content is boring. It seems like every chapter dealt with creating horrible 3D effects with Flash's primative x,y,z axis commands in actionscript. Only Gabriel's chapter really pulls off a neat 3D trick, everybody else is just making cheesy wire frame navigations. I noticed another technique, which is covered twice in the book, is getting the date and time to display in flash, VERY exciting stuff here. Granted, if you like this sort of stuff the book covers it really well. If you're looking for diverse techniques from a variety of artists, you are going to be disappointed. Skim it in a bookstore and just set it down...
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15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Pretty, but mostly empty, July 30, 2001
This review is from: New Masters of Flash: The 2002 Annual (Paperback)
This is a prettier book than last year's edition of NMoF, and it's good that the code is now up to Flash 5 syntax. But it's a book full of kids who've come up with some nifty tricks. They're not "masters", not when Yugo Nakamura is still out-thinking and out-programming everyone featured here. Look, "master" is something you call someone with years of experience, who's done it all, and has arrived at a style of her own that makes a genuine contribution not just to some variation of drag-and-drop, but to the broader world of culture beyond dot-syntax and alpha tweens. Yugo's stuff is beginning to genuinely do that; the stuff in this book isn't even close. Oh yeah, that's right, Yugo's studied architecture, and engineering, and math, and thinks creatively about connection people through novel interactive forms. The stuff in this book is just fashionable style. In a year, who out of NMoF will you still be impressed by?
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A must-have for your collection, September 3, 2001
This review is from: New Masters of Flash: The 2002 Annual (Paperback)
The tutorials worked through in this book are really up close and detailed, and absolutely nothing is skipped: each chapter begins with instructions on what size to create your canvas, and finishes by telling you to export your final .swf file. In between you have not only detailed descriptions, but also loads of screenshots, and every line of ActionScript code file typed out. The book also comes with an accompanying CD containing not just every .fla used in the book, but also video interviews with some of the designers, and if the static printed screenshots in the book aren't enough for you, then just sit back and watch the amazing animated walkthroughs on how to build your movie in the application itself. So if you don't feel like lugging the massive 500+ page book around with you when you go somewhere, just pop the CD into your pocket and you've got everything you need. The book continues in the fine tradition of its predecessor, but now, in response to user demands apparently, there is a brand new element to be found at the end of each chapter: Headnotes. This is a small section in which we are told how to expand the example we have just worked through, or how we can alter it slightly to get a totally different result. So if for example, the tutorial walks you through an effect that makes use of the cursor's X position to control a horizontal slide of some sort, the headnotes might suggest making use of both the X AND Y properties of the cursor to create an object that seems to rotate in 3D. It's things like this that mean the book is not just a set of 15 set, un-changeable effects that you can't do much with, without looking like you're ripping off the creator, which some people may mistakenly believe when merely skimming through the book. The headnotes invite your mind to look at the examples not as one complete contained effect, but rather one end result that was achieved by using a whole range of possible techniques within Flash, and that it is these individual techniques that your mind should be looking to and combining when wanting to create any other effects of your own. Although this book is aimed at people who are "at the summit" and is written by some of the leading Flash designers in the world, it is a book that absolutely every Flash user (and a whole bunch of non-Flash users) of every skill level will enjoy immensely. The whole book is written in easy-to-understand terms, without ever once being patronising. This is not only an excellent book on how to learn to work with a fairly advanced level of Flash, but it is also an excellent standalone design book.
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