Macromedia Flash is a key technology for designing and delivering low-bandwidth animations, presentations, and web sites. More recently it has become development environment, complete with scripting capabilities and server-side connectivity. Flash has the ability to easily integrate with, and add interactivity to, complex media types with powerful and intuitive tools. Developers can rapidly develop high performance, accessible content using pre-assembled building blocks and expand their authoring capabilities with custom extensions from independent developers.

 

Macromedia Flash MX Unleashed covers these high-end topics, providing you with a solid and complete reference for building Flash websites and applications. Fundamentals are covered quickly in the first part of the book, with the majority of the content devoted to coverage of ActionScript and how Flash works with varied middleware. You'll also learn how to integrate Flash with several other technologies, including XML and PHP.

Great Product
I’m using this book for a graduate Interactive Multimedia course. Following along with each chapter’s topic, you get good coverage and an easy to learn experience with Flash. Great for beginners like me!

Review for the Alaska and Military Members Apple User Group
It has been my pleasure to review many excellent books in the months that I’ve been reviewing for the Alaskan Apple Users Group. This month’s review is no exception. David Vogeleer’s Macromedia Flash Professional 8 is in every meaningful way PERFECT. Being a veteran user of Flash since Flash 4, I went into this review with a very specific demands. Before I opened book I sat down and made an obsessively long list of the topics I believed a proper Flash book should contain and braced myself should the author miss one. Refreshingly I was pleasantly surprised again and again as I read through the 28 impressive chapters chronicling the newest incarnation of creativity that is the Flash legacy.

The author begins his book with a chapter covering big differences -- both in appearance and layout as well as features and possibilities -- between the newest version of Flash and it’s predecessors. The chapter is concise and extremely well written and benefits seasoned and fresh users alike. Seasoned users will appreciate the briefing on the changes that they will need or want to make to convert from the way they are used to doing their Flash development. Fresh Flash users will be excited by the impressive list of new attractive features which now complement the features that originally caused them to have a desire to learn Flash in the first place.

After wetting the readers appetite, the author presents a series of chapters -- similar to the ones found in countless competing books -- which explain the drawing and animation procedures of Flash. Although these chapters cover common techniques they are nonetheless well written. They contain in-depth explanations of many of not all of the options and features of certain menus windows and tabs, and also well selected screen shots that the reader can use as a base of comparison. The author also includes numerous walkthroughs that guide the user through using many of the features and techniques in the book. The author uses clear and easy to understand instructions and also includes hot-keys where applicable. Though the quality of the first seven chapters alone would probably have been sufficient to get a kind review, I was pleased that it didn’t stop without mentioning ActionScript.

ActionScript is the embedded programming language in Flash. With a similar syntax to JavaScript, Java, or C, ActionScript it will have a familiar feel to most programmers of other languages. It is an enormously powerful tool that allows for dynamic behavior inside of flash programs and much more. Far from simply mentioning ActionScript, the author devotes the next ten chapters to a better presentation of ActionScript than many books which are devoted solely to ActionScript do. The author provides a beautiful introduction to ActionScript and to programming including an excellent overview of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) that rivaled the introduction provided by my OOP textbook that I used at the University of Alaska for a B.S. in Computer Sciences. The OOP introduction is clean and examples are directly applied to Flash. Again numerous walkthroughs and code examples are provided by the author. Seasoned users benefit from these sections in many ways. Early in the first chapter, the author provides comparisons between ActionScript 1.0 and the new ActionScript 2.0 which are very useful for a quick transition. You can visually see what you are used to and what you must use in future coding. Though either a seasoned Flash user or a seasoned programmer of another language may be tempted to skip some of these chapters I strongly recommend reading them all since they are packed so full of information that in skipping even a single page, even the most seasoned Flash user may fail to learn a new thing about the language.

By the time I had finished the 17th chapter of the book, it was guaranteed a great review, but it didn’t stop there. Flash is wonderful but it’s even more powerful when paired with other technologies. Far surpassing my expectations, the author devotes the next ten chapters to an in depth coverage of integration of Flash with many of my favorite technologies including PHP, MySQL and XML. The author gives excellent examples of both how to use Flash with other technologies as well as why a developer would want to. The author wisely chose to divide the chapters by technology rather than by type of integration which gives the reader the ability to skip chapters covering technologies such as ASP which a developer may not have experience with or fond feelings for.

In closure, this book in EXCELLENT. It is a companion for the devoted learner of Flash and the seasoned user alike. This book is worth it’s weight in gold and should be found on any Flash developer’s book shelf.

Unless you’re a hardcore programmer, don’t buy this one.
I’m new to programming and, while I had some difficulty understanding the concepts within this title, I would not recommend this to anyone that’s less than an intermediate level programmer. As opposed to titles that take you through the entire process of creating a website start to finish, this mostly introduces new concepts that help to build on your knowledge of ActionScript 2.0.

If you’re wishing to feel a sense of acccomplishment after reading this title cover-to-cover, you will be sorely disappointed. The sample exercises show how key concepts can enhance your web site/applications/scripts, but there is no end result that allows you to sit back and feel that you’ve accomplished anything substantial.

Any newbie to Flash wishing to increase their knowledge of ActionScript 2.0 should first learn how to create their own fully functional website using some ActionScript before tackling this book.

Proofreading unleashed
I am new to programming and I’m finding that this book does a good job overall in leading me through new concepts. There are, however, an absolutely unacceptable number of typos and grammatical errors in this book. I doubt that it was proofread even once by the author or editor.

Here’s a good example:
(from p.351)
"But not every listener event in components is as easy as this one, but in general, you can use the event name, in the above case "click", and add "Handler" to it to create a call-back."

You don’t have to know anything about programming to see that there are so many things wrong with that sentence that the mind simply has nothing to grasp hold of. Learning to program is difficult enough without having to muddle through such garbage.

I hope SAMS shows more respect for its readers and customers in the future.

Good medium level book
My overall opinion of this book is that it is good. It covers a lot of ground and for those of you with some experience in Flash you will find this book will help you do more with the new version of Flash.
The layout of this book was in my opinion done very well; there are three main sections and the ActionScript reference is not one of them nor does it take up half the book. The first section is the "Getting Started" piece which goes over the basics which you may already be familiar. This section does go into some detail about what is new in Flash 8 and how to take advantage of these new features. One item I liked was learning about drawn lines and how I can tweak the end points or the corners in my drawn boxes/rectangles. Also there was the tween editor for manipulating how I wanted an object to tween. Great stuff since I am more of the coder than the designer.
The second part of the book is more familiar to me, it is on ActionScript. This material covers many of the classes and how to work with particular data types like Arrays and Strings. Also there is some Object Orientated Programming (OOP) information, just enough to whet an appetite but not that much to frustrate you to no end. There are plenty of books out there which focus on ActionScripting too much higher levels this book does a good job of getting you to a higher level without the heartache.
The last part of the book really hits on the current use of Flash as a dynamic medium, talking through middleware to a server or database. This is an extremely useful skill as a developer, the more you can do with Flash to communicate outside of the Flash player the better off you are. You will find material on ASP, PHP and even a chapter on Remoting. You will not find examples here that are too extreme but it will cover the basics so you can take what you glean from the text and do more on your own. One chapter I was pleased to see was one on functions, events and debugging. These three items are important to know how to use well for creating top notch Flash media. I was even surprised to see material on integrating JSFL into your development process, very welcome material.
I came to this book looking for information on the new version of Flash and to see what else I can do with it as a developer. Most everything I was looking for was here and the items I wanted to find and did not probably were too advanced for the book anyway. (No material on using Scale 9 and the material on uploading files was quite skimpy.) What I did get out of the book was enough to keep me busy for a while. If you have time over the holiday break this would be a good book to blow through so you can begin the New Year with some new skills and knowledge.