Macromedia Flash Professional 8 Unleashed

• Cover Type: Paperback with 1008 pages
• Published by: Sams; 3Rev Ed edition October 20, 2005
• Written in: English
• ISBN 10 Number: 0672327619
• ISBN 13 Number: 978-0672327612
• Book Dimensions: 9 x 7 x 1.9 inches
• Weighs: 2.8 pounds

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. basics 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.

About The Author
David Vogeleer is a Flash ActionScript instructor who has been working in Flash since version 4. His focus has been on ActionScript and data integration. A co-author for Flash MXand Flash MX 2004 Unleashed, Vogeleer has published numerous articles about advanced usage of Flash. He has presented Flash talks at many venues, including Macromedia user groups, Microsoft user groups, and colleges. He is a certified Flash developer with years of experience in developing rich Internet applications.

Reader Reviews
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. Comment | | (Report this)