Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers | Tom Green, David Stiller

Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers | Tom Green, David Stiller | Practical and Extensive...A Great Book!

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Foundation Flash C...

	Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers Tom Green, David Stiller friends of ED, 2007 - 600 pages average customer review:based on 42 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Solid book for the beginner

I have never used Flash before. I purchased this book in order to learn how to put together some cool animations for video title scenes that I am working on. I am very happy with this purchase. I am not an expert after having gone through it, but learned exactly what I needed to in order to get my job done. That is one of the strengths of this book, after the first three chapters, you really can jump around and focus on what you need to.

Overall this book is well written. The authors managed to anticipate all of the questions that popped in my head as I was reading and following the examples. I did get a little frustrated in the "Building a Flash Movie" section of chapter 1. This section offers step by step instructions on the elements of creating a flash movie. Unfortunately, not all of the instructions are clear cut for the novice. For example, there is a set of instructions on creating a moon shadow that I followed precisely many many times. The confusion comes about when you are instructed to "click" on an object. There are different ways to click on an object in FLASH which the authors do not cover in chapter 1. In addition, I had "object drawing mode" turned on, which is not explained until chapter 2. This was very frustrating to me because I was following the instruction precisely and it was not working out. I persevered through it and can now tell you exactly what was wrong.

Chapter 2 is a real eye-opener if you manage to get through "creating a Flash Movie" in CH1. In chapter 2, I learned about the fundamentals of the features that had frustrated me in chapter 1.

Chapter 3 rounds out the last of the essentials that you should really have under your belt. There was a section on 9-slice scaling that I feel was not well done and the example used was in poor taste. The authors used images of a cross-dressing man in green leotards that dresses up as Peter Pan. I found the images to be quite disturbing and had the misfortune of having to work with this image in order to learn 9-slice scaling which I never learned because maybe I was too distracted by the fact that I was working on an image of a grown man dressed in pantyhose, a green dress and shiny shoes. Whatever happened to images of flowers and mountains? Really guys? Peter Pan? Was the Cinderella guy too busy to pose for you that day?

Peter Pan aside, this book get a full 5 stars for content. I really learned a lot and the authors made this book fun and easy to read. I do recommend that the novice reader not dwell on the building a flash movie in section 1 if things are not working out. It will all become clear in subsequent chapters. Also, maybe it is written in really big letters somewhere and I missed it, but I could not find one reference in the book to tell you where to go to download the companion zip folders that contain the sample files that the reader will need. I had to google it and when I did find a source, the Chapter 8 files kept coming in as corrupt files. I had to go to a secondary source to find Chapter 8. (you can find the files on the friends-of-ed website.) With these small few exceptions, I highly recommend this book.

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Practical and Extensive...A Great Book!

Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers is a great book because it is simple enough for someone brand new to the Flash like me, and difficult enough to provide information useful for real world design.

Each tutorial is easy to read with language not hard to understand like other software books. Also, for people who like to see things instead of read them, there are pictures on almost every page making it easy to see what the final product should look like.

Another great feature of the book is the ability to use the index, find what you want to learn, and then go to that tutorial. Although it is smart to read the book from front to back, often you may want to find information about a specific task or feature. In the book, it is not necessary to read all to know one feature in Flash. You can just flip right to it.

Lastly, the book does a good job of touching briefly on Action Script 3.0. The code is extremely difficult and the book does an excellent job of breaking it down so it does not seem too daunting or extreme, which is great for beginners.

I would recommend this book to anyone from beginner to immediate who is either interested in Flash for fun or is interested in designing for others.

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Awesome book

This book is awesome. I used it as reference for a flash course that i took and it was very helpful.

Excellent

This is a great book for beginners. I am about 250 pages into it at this point, having just completed building the mp3 player example this past weekend. I'm still not entirely clear on many details of Actionscript 3.0 having no prior experience in Actionscript, but I am getting there. The instructional style and design is good. Most examples are very clear and the authors make it fun to learn. Highly recommended.

Newbie to Flash

Liking the book a lot so far. This book does a clear and concise explanation of the basics and on. It makes designers like me who really just do print and have been only doing online stuff minimally. I'm almost half-way through the book and learning has been fun. The explanations and terminology is easy to understand. It is also easy to follow as you have Flash CS3 open. Great walk through. I'm so glad I found this book. Now I'm not as scared to face the Flash monster and Actionscript. My next goal will be Dreamweaver.

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