Do you like to learn by doing? Do manuals leave you bored and craving real-world examples? Do you want to concrete training that goes beyond theory and reference materials? If so, this book is for you. These hands-on exercises teach you to start creating Flash animations and interactive files with little effort. You ll learn to create vector animations using a wide variety of drawing tools and Timeline effects, and add interactivity and dynamic content to your projects by using ActionScript 2, Components, and the Behaviors panel. You ll also learn how to import bitmaps, sounds, and video to make your Flash projects more engaging, and find extensive coverage of the new Flash 8 features: the improved text tool, new text rendering engine, new graphic filters, and more. Complete with insider tips, illustrated with detailed graphics, and accompanied by a CD loaded with classroom-proven exercises.

Do you like to learn by doing? Do manuals leave you bored and craving real-world examples? Do you want to concrete training that goes beyond theory and reference materials? If so, this book is for you.

These hands-on exercises teach you to start creating Flash animations and interactive files with little effort. You’ll learn to create vector animations using a wide variety if drawing tools and Timeline effects, and add interactivity and dynamic content to your projects by using ActionScript 2, Components, and the Behaviors panel.  You’ll also learn how to import bitmaps, sounds, and video to make your Flash projects more engaging, and find extensive coverage of the new Flash 8 features: the improved text tool, new text rendering engine, new graphic filters, and more.  

Complete with insider tips, illustrated with detailed graphics, and accompanied by a CD loaded with classroom-proven exercises and QuickTime movies, this book ensures you’ll master key features of Flash 8 in no time.

Good for a beginner
I’m always apprehensive about purchasing tech books so I normally go to the library and check them out for a few days before the purchase. With this book I didn’t do that and I must say I am pleasantly surprised. The exercises are interesting and easy to follow. The tutorial CD is also quite good.

Flash 8 - great program
I wanted to add some dynamics to my web pages and I got Flash 8.
I needed a book so I bought this book. I found the book very helpful
and useful

Good if you already know the basics
If you are farmiliar with other Adobe/Macromedia software (like PhotoShop, Illustrator, etc.) the transition to Flash using this book should be realitively easy. I learned some new tricks/shortcuts and the sample files included on the CD are helpful. I am very pleased with this book and would recommend it if you know enough to get around in Flash but aren’t comfortable.

If you are completely new to image/animation or web design software I don’t believe this book will help you.

Great and it was shipped fast. Good Seller Recommended!
I bought this product for another person and they loved it. It helped them in their understanding with Macro media flash professional hands on training. I can recommend this book to someone who needs a better understanding of how this works.

flash starter
This is a great book. It gives an introduction to learning flash for beginners. Easy to learn step by step instructions along with the CD exercises.

thorough, clear and comprehesive introduction to flash
I used this book for a class I took. I found it very useful. The hands on training in the form of color tutorials was very useful for learning flash. This book is only an introduction to flash as is shown by the fact that you only learn how to use preexisting Actionscript rather than program your own code. Also, the new version of flash (CS3) uses a different version of Action Script so what you learn here will not be useful. Still, this book is more than adequate even for the new version of flash. Although it is expensive you get what you pay for in this case.

Yes! A ’must have’ book for the beginner and intermediate user.
By using this book, a know-nothin’ beginner can be up and running with Flash 8 in a weekend. No kidding. I never even opened the program before receiving this book, and after a weekend I was designing some pretty decent stuff. I have extensive experience with Photoshop and Illustrator, but even without these as a background feel that anyone can create something useful after only 8 hours with this book.

The step-by-step instructions are precise and quite explanatory. That’s not to say that exercises go on forever, they’re just thoroughly explained. For example: four pages are devoted to the sometimes frustrating concept of Merge and Object Drawing Models. A newbie may find this concept confusing unless they have had it shown to them. (Example: A student next to me was getting furious over the fact that his overlapping ellipses kept eating away the shapes behind them. That is until I showed him page 50.) Simple to some, but without some formal training it would just seem frustrating.

The disc includes some decent exercise files and the typical instructional videos that we have come to expect at the point in the game. Not that they are bad in any way, just not much different than other I have seen. I personally enjoy the videos when it comes to a complex topic.

Another notable that was important to me was the big section at the end on importing content from Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks. Nice and easy once you know how to do it properly.

I highly recommend this book to anyone looking to learn Flash 8. It will give you the basics and functionality of the program. If you are not very experimental and don’t have the time to push the limits on your own, there may be another book out there for ’tricks, tips, cheats’ to help you go wild with it. This book is not the ’tricks, tips, cheats’ kind of book that will show the ’hidden secrets’ so many other claim. But, it is complete in the fact that it will show you how to do just about the basics of each function. And for some areas, a little beyond the basic functionality.

Not that it should matter, but you will deal with the single concept of the snowboarder for almost every exercise in the book. Not every exercise is the same file or image, but almost all of them are snowboarding-related. You’ll see why when you get to the motion and video portion of the book.

Not for a Flash newbie or an H O T books fan
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!

Great Book for Helping Someone Learn Flash
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.

Beginner Flash Programmers MUST Have This Book
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. [...].

Great Teaching Book
I’ve really enjoyed this book, it’s very clear and too the point. Comes with videos where needed, a few more would be nice, but it’s really enough. If you go through all the lessons, you will be generating websites in Flash pretty quickly.

Good starting point
This book covers the basics and guides you step by step through the basic functionality of FLASH. I recommend this book for Flash starters, who wants to get serious about FLASH down the track. This book is not suitable for FLASH pros though, but still can be regarded as a good reference.

this book rules!
I am using this book for my intro flash class and have come to find it invaluable to navigating the complex world of Flash design. Kudos.

Great Book
This book has really help me in understanding the basics of computer animation.
The tutorials are very easy to follow, and the pictures really help view the big picture.
Overall I would definitly recommend this book, to novices or professionals.

super
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

BUY THIS BOOK!!!
If you are new to flash and want to learn it, then you have to buy this book. Compared to all the other Flash training books, this is by far the best.

H.O.T, says it all
It’s a really easy to comprehend book, contains all kinds of exercises and also comes with a cd to make it more interactive, you never get bored with it like in other books that teach you flash

Flash Prof 8 review
I am 68 and wanted to learn about Flash. This book is used by my class at a local community college and its instructions are very clear and simple to follow.

Excellent
The information is clearly presented, easily accessible, and a great tool for folks who are visually oriented.
It is one of the few manuals I look enjoy using.

Great book!
It’s everything basic that you need to know about Flash 8! Helpful exercises and simple directions. I really enjoyed working with this book for my class and I think that they are extremely helpful.

Macromedia Flash Professional 8
it is a new brand book, easy to understand, a lot of re-do example simplifies learning process.

Good Book but for beginners
This is a good book for if you are completely new to flash. Also if you are looking for step by step instruction... this is a good book.
But if you looking for something above the beginners level... try something else.

Lacks depth important 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.

Recent Purchase
I was a little surprised at the condition of the book, considering it was a new purchase. It took longer to arrive than I would have liked.

Great Book!
I got a lot from this book. I recommend it for anyone new to Flash. The included CD is a valuable asset.

Interesting, but too instructional.
This book is a hands-on guide for Flash 8. The problem is if you want to really learn the program, you should practice creating things, not follow step by step to emulate a bunch of premade exercises. Of course, if you don’t use this book you could be missing out also.

Great Book
This book is great. I was (am?) a total beginner to Flash (though I have experience with Maya and Adobe After Effects so the time line and keyframing etc. was already familiar to me) And I was able to follow every exercise in this book with no problem (that alone is saying something, after struggling through some very sloppily written Maya Instructional books with many errors- which made it almost impossible for a beginner to complete some of the exercises)
This book was concise, clear and well written, and a breeze to follow along with (absolutely zero frustration). After finishing all the exercises, I felt I had a good basic grasp of Flash. I’d highly reccommend this book to any beginner wanting to learn Flash.

Couldn’t Be Any Easier!
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.

Better than Video Tutorials and My Example Websites
If you want to learn flash I think this book is excellent. It’s clear and straight forward. If you are considering using video tutorials I have a word of advice - don’t. Buy this book. It’s cheaper and more effective than video tutorials. I waded through about 6 video tutorials and I still felt like an abject novice. I figured at the rate I was going I would never learn flash. Using this book on the other hand I quickly learned flash and found it clear and understandable.

The proof is in the pudding though right? So here are a couple of sites I was able to make after reading the book.

[...]

Great for a beginner like me...
I had thumbed through several Flash 8 books in the local bookstore before deciding on this one. What drew me to it was that the examples progress from the basics into an end-result project. You can eliminate chapters if need be with no bearing on the final project as the necessary example files are provided on the disc for each chapter.

I’m new to Flash with no experience with any prior version. My intentions were to learn to a point where I am comfortable creating animations (somewhat satisfied by the time I reached chapter 6) as well as interactive web pages (which I haven’t yet gotten to in the book).

I would highly recommend this book for anyone trying to learning Flash for the first time on version 8. It might even serve as a good refresher for those with experience on prior versions and whom are looking to keep up to date on version 8.

A good way to get a strong Flash foundation
A good way to get a start with Flash.

Although it took me a while to work through the examples in the book, I was happy with the results. This book is for WYSIWYG people though. In the end I was able to do most of the nifty animation "eye candy" (via the WYSIWYG) I wanted to do. I also had a semi-decent idea of what to do to get going in ActionScript (although I have a much better book on that subject I’d recommend instead).

There are two schools of Flash people (usually): WYSIWYG people and ActionScript people. This book is for the first type for sure. I wouldn’t give this book any awards, but it is a good way to start your Flash.

A good way to get a strong Flash foundation
A good way to get a good foundation in Flash

Although it took me a while to work through the examples in the book, I was happy with the results. In the end I was able to do most of the nifty animation "eye candy" I wanted to do. I also had a decent idea of what to do get going in ActionScript.

I wouldn’t give this book any awards, but it is a good way to start your Flash.

A good introduction
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.

This book is not well organized...
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.

Great hands-on learning
Flash is quite an intense, and can be, complicated program. It is utterly amazing what this program can do. But understanding how to get it to do what you want does take some study.

I have a graphic arts background and have been working in print for over 18 years. I have only in the last few years done some web design. I am currently studying web and multimedia to further develop my skills in this area. And while I found no difficulty learning Dreamweaver 8 ( I also have the Lynda Dreamweaver 8 book), Flash 8 proved to be more challenging.

Lynda’s Flash Professional 8 (HOT) has been a terrific resource in my studies. This book takes you step-by-step through different lessons and gives you a wonderful basis of understanding in how to create animations in Flash. Action Scripting (Flash’s unique programming language) is the key to Flash and this book does give you some basic understanding of how to develop some terrific interactivity with it. For more advanced AS, there are other books available. But to just get started, this book is wonderful.

If you are just getting started with Flash and need a hands-on, step-by-step tutorial, I highly recommend this book.

Want to understand and learn Flash 8? This is a book for you!
I have been skeptical of online learning classes and books that promise you the ability to learn quickly a new program. Too many times, you don’t really understand the program, you just get a quick overview of the program. When you want to solve a problem outside of the scope of the book, you have very little clue to know what to do.

Having said that, the lynda.com book, Flash Pro 8: Hands on Training, breaks out of that mold. The examples and explanations are very helpful. You have the book’s explanation, a video of the exercise (on CD), and the exercise files on the CD. This is not a book you will go through in 24 hours. It will take at least 1 week of 40 hours of constant study, though I don’t recommend that approach. This book is more like a 10 week class at a local college with a very knowledgable professor. It is still intense, but you need the time to let the material soak in.

As all good text books, and not all text books are good, this is a book you will come back to as a reference. I know I am!

sweet!
I always try to write a quickish online review for computer books that touch me. This one has. Coming from After Effects and its timeline, Flash can be confusing, but James Gonzalez is golden when it comes to describing Flash’s interface and how it the program works as a whole. I would have liked more scripting and less use of the Script Assist feature - which seems a little lazy and like letting the emperor of Oz take over - but hardcore actionscripting is obviously beyond this book’s foundational approach. Sum: Good book. Thanks to all involved!

Learn all the Flash 8 basics in this great book!
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...

Best flash 8 training source
I was many times in different bookstores and went through almost all flash 8 training books. This one is the best.