Bonnie Blake, MFA, (Oakland, NJ) is an award-winning designer who specializes in graphic design and multimedia, and has been an avid Flash user since its first release.  She is an Assistant Professor of Multimedia Design at Ramapo College of New Jersey.  Bonnie is the author of the first two editions of How To Do Everything with Flash, co-author of the third edition of How To Do Everything With Flash, 50 Fast Digital Video Techniques, Master Visually iPod and iTunes (Wiley), and Flash Deconstruct (NRP), as well as the author of Flash 5 ActionScript, a best selling online course at ehandson.com.

Doug Sahlin (Lakeland, FL) is an author, graphic designer, and Web site designer living in Central Florida. He is the author of twelve books on graphic design including How To Do Everything with Adobe Acrobat 6.0. Sahlin’s articles and product reviews have appeared in national publications such as Computer Graphics World, 3D Magazine, Video Systems, and Corel Magazine. His tutorials have been featured at numerous Web sites devoted to graphic design.

Understand the latest developments in Flash MX 2004, and learn to easily create and publish motion graphics, movies, sound files, presentations, low-bandwidth Web sites, and more. How to Do Everything with Macromedia Flash MX 2004 will help you get the most from Flash by presenting well-organized, bite-sized bits of information. Fully updated coverage includes all aspects of Flash--design as well as programming and development. Create Flash animations and interactive movies with behaviors and ActionScript, and discover why Flash is the world’s most widely used Web graphics application.

• Follow a results-oriented format that makes learning Flash fun and easy
• Create fast-loading interactive movies that feature buttons, navigation menus, and animations
• Use basic drawing tools and understand each element of the interface and toolbar
• Modify the color, transparency, rotation, scale, and skew of any object
• Copy and paste repetitive tasks using the powerful new History panel
• Add and edit graphics, video, and sound in your movies
• Utilize a full range of animation features including motion and shape tweening
• Learn to use behaviors and timeline effects
• Incorporate MPEG, DV, and QuickTime files into your Flash movie
• Use Components to quickly create scrolling text, graphics, and other complex interactivity

Flash files available online

About the authors: Bonnie Blake is an award-winning designer who specializes in Web design and multimedia. She is an Assistant Professor of Design Ramapo College in New Jersey, and is the author of several books on Web design and digital video editing including How To Do Everything with Macromedia Flash 5, How To Do Everything with Macromedia Flash MX, and Adobe Premiere Virtual Classroom.

Doug Sahlin is an author and a graphic and Web site designer. He uses Macromedia applications to design interactive Web sites for his clients. Sahlin is the author of several books on Web, graphic design, and digital video including, How To Do Everything with Macromedia Contribute and How To Do Everything with Adobe Acrobat 6.0.

Bring your graphics to life with this vibrant resource that offers easy-to-find answers for beginners to intermediate users. Regardless of your programming knowledge you’ll discover how to create fully interactive and fast loading Web elements such as buttons, menu, animations, and backgrounds. Then, when you feel ready, move into ActionScript programming for some full-throttle creativity.

The Book I Reach for First
This book got me going right away creating websites in Flash and it’s the first book I reach for when I’m having trouble or trying something new. It’s an easy read offering enough detail to let you explore a subject without being overly technical.

A useless book
This is not a book that deserves a read. You could find all the materials, presented better, from Macromedia site. It is also not a reference book because a lot of topics are not covered, though it is called "do everything".

nice start but gets complex
the book starts nicely but get complex as we proceed. the pictures and the text are given in different pages (causes confusion). The writing is not that simplistic. But anyway the author has covered all the topics.

this book is good if you want to know something about flash. but if you want to get inside / get thorough in flash then you need to get some other book.

Excellent resource for learning Flash MX
You will be amazed at how quickly you’ll be up and running using this book. I had no experience in flash before I picked this book up and now I use it as a dogeared reference and a tutorial. I liked this book because it takes you from absolute novice and shows all of the interface tools and alot of techniques, all in plain english. It reads like a textbook but with no excercises at the end of the chapters. Although actionscripting is introduced and used in about the last 3rd of the book, it doesn’t go heavy into that subject matter, and is honest about it. The bent is definitely more on how to use the tools, importing sound, using text, the timeline, and other graphic concerns. Those are important subjects to master before one dives into actionscript. All of the examples actually work (extremely important). You can download the examples from the website since there’s no cd. There was probably extensive editing, which I appreciate...I can’t find any typos or errors. The only errata I found were some of the keyboard shortcuts didn’t work, but that was a relatively minor hiccup. Overall, I found this to be an excellent resource for learning Flash MX. Kudos to Bonnie Blake!

Short and Concise-Good Book
This book got me animating after the first chapter. I like the way it’s organized. It made it very simple to learn Flash. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who has never used this program before. It’s also not boring. Thumbs up