ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training Review

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ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training ReviewKnowing nothing about Actionscript and having pitifully little programming experience, I turned to this book as a first step in learning Actionscript. It is very much part of the "Type this, click that" teaching method, which is great for getting your feet wet. You read through and do the exercises and stuff happens on the screen. The author includes some detail about Actionscript, but he doesn't discuss anything in depth. I found myself wanting more information in just about every exercise.
For example, the book includes an exercise for making a sort of word game. The program has arrays of names, verbs, and nouns. The interface also has inputs for adding words to the arrays. When the player presses the "generate" button, the program is supposed to fill in the blanks with words from the lists. Unfortunately, I found that the program frequently fails to generate a word, leaving a hole in the sentence. I know that can be fixed; but if I want to fix it, I have to do research and fix it myself. The book goes no further.
Along the same line, most of the exercises are empty exercises. The author frequently ends sections with instructions to close the exercise windows without saving the work. Larger projects are not followed from start to finish, either. Everything is broken into bite-sized pieces and pre-digested.
I've never used Lynda products before. While I did get something out of the book, I wouldn't really recommend it because it's not rigorous enough to truly learn Actionscript programming. It's just an introduction. I suppose that's the idea. To get the full education, you have to buy more products and do more exercises. I will look elsewhere for more information and give this book three stars.
ActionScript 3.0 for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training OverviewWhen Flash Player 9 released in June 2006, it introduced the new scripting language, ActionScript 3, which has already taken hold in the Adobe Flex application development community. In its latest release, Flash CS3 incorporates this new and much improved upon language into its development environment, giving Flash authors more flexibility than ever before. Now, they just need to learn how to use it and get started quickly. For the first time, the Flash experts at Lynda.com have poured their training expertise into this exciting book release. ActionScript 3 in Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Hands-On Training teaches readers all they need to know to get up and running with ActionScript 3 in Flash. It covers all the essentials and new features, including the brand new ActionScript debugger that allows users to step through a wide variety of properties in their code at runtime, with greater flexibility and feedback. Readers will also learn modern Web design and workflow techniques for developing their projects successfully with Flash using ActionScript 3. Accompanied by a CD-ROM loaded with classroom-proven exercises and QuickTime training videos, this book ensures readers will master the key features of ActionScript 3 in no time. Now that Flash is an integral part of the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Web Premium, Web Standard, and Design Premium packages, there is an even greater need for the clear, step-by-step approach this book offers.

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Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity (O'Reilly Digital Studio) Review

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Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity (O'Reilly Digital Studio) ReviewThis book is a unique one on Flash 8 because it tears down the wall between artistic design books and technical manuals and succeeds at being both. It starts out simple by showing you how to draw elementary figures. It then moves on to customizing your properties and automating your workflow so that you can design quickly. Next, animation is presented along with all of the techniques you will need to be efficient plus how to perform various effects. This book is particularly good at showing the reader how to import sound, graphics, and video, and how to use scripting via AppleScript to control it all. The lessons are done via unique and creative projects. By the end of the book you won't be an expert on Flash, design techniques, or AppleScript, but you will be pretty good at putting the 3 together to perform interesting tasks in Flash and doing so efficiently. A good companion book to this one is "Flash 8: The Missing Manual". It explains all of the technical nuts and bolts of Flash that there is not room to accommodate in this book. I notice that Amazon does not show the table of contents, so I do that next:
1. Getting Started, Right Out of the Box
Drawing Your First Box 1
Coloring Fills and Strokes 7
Merging and Stacking Shapes 16
Creating Reusable Graphics 22
2. Creating Quickly: Customizing Your Workspace
Designing Your Own Panel Layout 27
Customizing Movie Properties 32
Aligning Objects on the Stage 33
Behind Every Good Symbol Is a Good Editor 37
Automate Your Workflow 39
3. Your First Animation 45
Layers and the Timeline 46
Keyframes and Tweening 50
Preparing Text for Animation 52
Staggering Animation 57
Alpha Effect 58
Motion Effects 58
Your First Script 63
Publishing Your Movie 65
4. Buttons and Interactivity
Buttons as Symbols 69
Scripting Your Button 73
Components and Behaviors 79
Navigation 83
More Fun with Buttons 90
vi Contents
5. Working with Graphics
Importing Pixels 95
Working with Pixels 101
Importing Vectors 106
Using Scenes 109
Working with the Library 110
6. Movie Clips and Interactivity
Drawing a Cartoon Character 115
Controlling the Character with ActionScript 128
More Movie Clip Control 131
7. More Animation Techniques
Morphing with Shape Tweens 135
Frame-by-Frame Animation 139
Using Masks 143
Timeline Versus ActionScript Animation 155
8. Using Sound
Importing Sounds 161
Controlling External Sounds 169
Scripting Your Own Sound Control 172
9. Using Video
Importing Video 181
Controlling External Videos 184
Scripting Your Own Video Control 190
10. Compositing and Bitmap Effects
Runtime Bitmap Caching 197
Bitmap Filter Effects 199
Blend Modes 210
11. Working with Text
Text Types 217
Using Fonts 221
Loading and Styling Text 223
FlashType 230
12. Loading Assets on the Fly
Using ActionScript to Modularize Content 235
Preloading 240
13. e-Learning with Flash
Creating a Quiz: Getting Started with Templates 249
Sending Results with a Form 254
Saving and Retrieving Local Data 260
14. Flash for CD-ROM and Handhelds
Flash on CD-ROM 271
Flash on the Run 277
vii Contents
15. Think Outside the Box
Exporting to Video 291
The Drawing API 299
Extending Flash 303
The Rest Is Up to You 311
A. Tips and Resources
IndexFlash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity (O'Reilly Digital Studio) Overview
Macromedia Flash is fast becoming the Web's most widely used platform for creating rich media with animation and motion graphics, but mastering Flash isn't easy. Most entry-level books teach through simple examples that concentrate on either animation or scripting, but rarely both together. To get the most from Flash 8, you not only need to be proficient in programming/interface design, you need the creativity for story telling and the artistic insights to design fluid animation.

Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity teaches Flash design rather than simply Flash itself. With a standalone series of walkthroughs and tutorials for Flash beginners coming from a graphics field, this book teaches Flash in the context of real-world projects. Rather than learn a Flash tool for the sake of it, you learn which areas of Flash are important, and which are less used, simply by seeing how typical content is actually created. And rather than a text-heavy approach, this graphically rich book leads you through hands-on examples by illustration.

Each project in the book starts with goals and broad sketches before moving to design and scripting. This helps you understand design intent-the why of the process-rather than just learning the interfaces and the how of it all. Along the way, you'll create Flash content that includes traditional animation techniques (as seen in full-length animated features), and ActionScript-based interactive animation, such as custom web site interface designs. You also learn how to combine both traditional animation techniques and ActionScript to create feature-rich Flash assets from the ground up.

Co-authored by educational developers with years of experience creating compelling content, interfaces, and applications, Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity offers a content-driven approach that is also inspiration-driven.You learn because you're accomplishing something tangible, not because you think you need to know how a tool works.

If you want to understand how various features of Flash come together to create a final end design, this book provides you with both the insight and the know-how.


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