Customer Reviews

Teach Yourself VISUALLY Macromedia Flash MX 2004

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

 

 

I am a beginning Flash student and bought this book to compliment my classes at school.

I was initially attracted to this book due the abundant screenshots and arrowed-pointed annotations. However, very often, the technical writing is extremely sparse, basically giving one no more information than what a contextual menu would pop-up in an application's glossary section. The technical writings are no more than blurbs, and often times one really needed to study the screenshots to understand what the blurb was addressing.

The book wastes a alot of pages on some very rudimentry sections on basic Windows 101 practices such as: Opening and saving files, changes colors of the text, and text manipulation. The first 100 pages were basically review and intuitive for anyone with a fundamental computer background; thus making the first one-third of book pretty much a waste.

Speaking of waste, there was a cutesy-picture at the start or each section that might have been more efficently used for technical information or a section objective rather than a cute graphic.

In addition, there are no practices files on a cd or a website to acquire the media assests. I would have to create my own graphics to do the exercises. Thus, my outcomes never looked like the finished exercises in the book. Two-thirds of the way into this book, I was shopping for another Flash MX 2004 book to replace this sad, boring book.

This book is okay for a quick bookshelf reference but do yourself a favor and save your $30.00 for a more substantial technical manual.

This book taught me Flash MX 2004 very efficiently and quickly. Unlike other books it does not give tedious explanations that tend to tire and confuse the reader. It shows you precisely where and what to do. The illustrations are beautiful and direct, which is absolutely helpful for Flash graphics. This is also a well structured book so you can easily find the topics you want when you need a quick reference. If you want to learn Flash quickly and enjoy it while learning, buy this book.

Teach Yourself VISUALLY books overall are my favorite books to get when I am just starting out on a new program. Everything is so basic, clear, and easy to understand, the way they show it. Highly reccomended to all beginners.

I'm a visual person. This is the perfect book for someone like me. Short on unnecessaary copy, long on simple to understand pictures and guides. I would highly recommend this book or any of the "Teach yourself Visually" books.

I have been using this book for almost 2 months to teach myself Flash programming. I do think the book is very good at making things simple and easy to understand but sometimes it's "too easy." I think those that are learning flash programming are already going to have some experience with using computers, so some of the stuff that this book explains is unnecessary. Also, there are no source files so sometimes I would like to follow the directions in the book to do something but I don't have any basic source files to do any of the things the book describes...so I think this book is only good for introducing the program. I need to get another book that actually has a more "recipe" like structure so that I can follow along and do as the book instructs but with source files.