Rating:  - Written by a good teacher
Excellent book. The author has obviously taught classes and adopted a style that can be followed by any type of reader/student. If you are a novice you will have no trouble following each step-by-step lesson and learn the topics covered. When you are finished with the book your skill level will have improved.
If your skills are advanced or intermediate you will be able to get through each lesson quickly and learn another way of accomplishing something. The videos on the CD are good and delve deeper into the topics covered in the book.
One of the main goals of the book is to teach the concept of object oriented programming. As you go through the book you build a web site, or, better, an application that loads the different applications you learn about in the book, all tied together by a navigation section.
The use of winks and jokes may seem inappropriate to some, but it kept things light for me and I even laughed a couple of times.
I would recommend this book to anyone who needs to learn how to produce Flash applications. You must know the basics of Flash, and you will not learn about tying to databases or using XML or web services. This is why this is the perfect INTERMEDIATE Flash book.
Rating: - The best programming book I've ever read
I have been through the ringer with programming books. I've taken the Microsoft cert. courses, I worked with computer systems since I was a kid (I'm 28 now) and I have bought any book you can imagine. This book, however, was the first book that actually gave me practical uses and told me exactly what I was doing. It made total sense and made me excited to program.
For the longest time I have been looking for a book that can explain to me when to use specific datatypes, functions, if/else statements and so on. This book was the first to do that and I have, in the two weeks since I have gotten the book, been able to land two flash web design projects with a couple more in the works as we speak.
This book has changed my programming life and has completely opened my eyes to the power of actionscript and many other programming languages.
I only wish that Shane and Lynda would write more books in this fashion using other languages like Java or C#.
This is a fantastic book and I am happy that I bought it.
Rating: - Great Tool for the Intermediate Flash User
This is an excellent book. I have used the previous HOT books: Dreamweaver MX and Flash MX. However, this one gets into more interesting Flash techniques such as building a video and MP3 player. These books are always easy to follow and nothing is ever left unexplained. It's as if they know where you might have made a mistake and show you how to fix it. I definitely recommend all of the Hands On Training series.
Rating: - H.O.T Books
This is the first book I have read from this author. I am very pleased with what this book taught and I have recommended it to many others.
It is in my opinion not a real intermediate book but more like part 2 of a beginner book for coding. I think it could have gotten a little deeper. That is most likely just my take. I was not new to flash. I bought this book as a refresher and as a book that would update me and get me ready for Studio 8. I suggest this book to anyone starting in flash or who have basic knowledge of flash and anyone wanting to get a good soldi grasp of action script.
The action script they use to teach is great and how they explain stuff is also wonderful. It is a bit slow but in the scheme of things would you rather him go fast and confuse you or slow and slightly bore you. I did play the movie files on fast forward and you could understand everything perfectly. So pick this book up and add it to your collection. I do believe it will be a great addition to anyones library.
Rating: - grin
Okay, This book might be slow but again this was one of the books i used that open the doors to the macromedia field which I'm in now. This book is very basic and her videos which are in side the CD is the key really. The book is good the cd in this book is great. Perhaps one of the best ideas any author can do, make a cd with video. I'm not kidding i had a final to do in flash okay and me as a 3d designer i added 3d into my flash website for my school(keep in mind she doesnt teach 3d stuff in flash) believe me people i learned flash in 1 day basically i stayed up day and night and got hooked and learn the basic and pass with a big A. True story this is a great book and the author she did a hell of a great job. But like everyone said its slow if you read it, it's very slow because she's very basic and wants the person to really get it the first time instead of going back and trying to read the whole thing over again, but indeed this is a great book.
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