Flash 4 Magic
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
Rg
Rg
RgFlash 4 Magic of 21 Flash projects that basically teach you the charms of Flash. It teaches you how to do cool stuff. Among the projects are a preloader with real progress bar, poll, guestbook, drag and drop interface and lava lamp. These projects are very enlightenening and the CD that comes with this book literally pays for itself. I'm not joking when I say that I would have payed the $36.00 for the CD alone. The CD is so good, that I think I'll start my review with it.
When you pop it in you get an autoplay, done in Flash, that lets you navigate the elements of the CD. This would have been a welcome feature to Mohler's book reviewed above, and it is hence very welcome in this Flash 4 Magic book's CD as the source codes are much more interesting. All twenty-one of the projects that ARE the book have their full source code on the CD. Also included are a bunch of 3rd-party software to help you with sound editing, image editing, html, and various Flash features. Through their autoplay system you can easily view the source code or actually watch the project run in it's entirety so you have an idea of what you're reading. Bottom line, this CD has been so helpful that I put it in a steel jewelcase.
Speaking of design, there should have been a second CD released with this book. One entitled, The Making of Flash 4 Magic. In all sincerity, this book should win awards for basic page layout and design! I was very impressed at the representation of the tutorials and could tell the guys who designed this book and the guys who did all the source code are true designers at heart. Now, does Magic live up to the hype in terms of content?
Definitely! All of these tutorials are well-explained. All FlashScript/Actionscript are displayed in yellow boxes so you can see how they work, and there are full color screenshots(That was one more thing I would have appreciated in Mohler's book: color. Flash 4 Magic is made by real designers so I'm sure they wouldn't print a black and white book to discuss Flash). They use a simple and easy-to-follow step system where they just outline the steps, accompanied with the screenshots and code boxes, on how to create the project.
At the end they have a page or half a page on "How it Works" that explains you what all that code actually does. And then, for every project, they include a "Modifications" section, telling you things you could attempt on your own to improve on their source code and teach yourself some more cool stuff in Flash. For example, for the first tutorial, the preloader, one of the modifications they reccomend is having the preloaded elements fly across the screen in some Flash-esque manner while they're loading up, which is a technique commonly used in Hollywood when you see computer screen loading things or downloading from the internet. This could entertain the user while the animation is loading, and hint at the things s/he can expect to see inside.
In the appendix they have a beginners guide to ActionScript. Although this section is very good for introducing a user to Actionscript, it doesn't go into depth. They don't have any "Advanced Actionscript" sections in this book.
That's the only problem with the book, although these tutorials are great and fun and teach you plenty, they don't explain much about what you're doing. That's why I reccomend you buy Mohler's book AND this one. That's the path I took, and it's really what I think the best path is. With Mohler's text-book style learning and Magic's cool tutorials and source code, in a few weeks you could make yourself the Flash master you always wanted to be.
Resource Links
The author's site - www.flashzone.com - David Emberton
The author's site - www.eyeland.com - J. Scott Hamlin
Email the reviewer - Morganth
The publisher's site - www.newriders.com
No Download for this Review
