Customer Reviews

Special Edition Using Macromedia Flash 5 (with CD-ROM)

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Unlike some other reviewers, I was very satisfied with the quality of this book, but I bought it specifically for the sections (Chapters 14-30, literally half the book) written by Darrel Plant, which focuses on ActionScript.

I've been a fan of Darrel's since his "Lingo Programmer's Reference", possibly the best reference book on programming in Director ever written (and happily soon to be updated in a new title, "Lingo Line By Line"), and my advice to anyone wanting to move from Lingo to ActionScript (or simply to learn how to program in Flash) is to buy this book. As usual, one chapter alone ("Understanding the FSCommand System") saved me hours of work and frustration, clearly explaining how to communicate between different movies or between the movie and browser environments.

They're are probably better Flash overview and animation guides for the beginner. But this is the best ActionScript reference available today.

I was in the section on tweening (which I've never done before), and I followed the author's instructions exactly, step by step. And, much to my dismay, the animation didn't work. I looked up the same subject in the Flash documentation and found that the author had failed to mention that I had to make a symbol out of the object to be tweened. IT WILL NOT WORK OTHERWISE! A simple but NECESSARY step was left out of this book's explanation. This book was expensive, too. What good is it if the book is well-written but leaves out critical information?
I'd recommend instead the best book that I've found on this subject which was "Foundation Flash 5" by by Sham Bhangal, et al.

I found this book very disapointing for many reasons. It seems 200 pages short and does not cover anything special. it is 500 pages of wordy instruction. Peach Pits flash 5 easy quick start and pro guides are much smaller and have so much more material covered. The que special edition books usually have really inovative projects. I am sorry to say that this one is just not up to par