Rating: 
Summary: Easy to follow but hard to understand
Review: If you are used to Adobe CLASS IN A BOOK series, you will like the way this book walks you through examples. This book has great supplement(CD) and examples but it was really hard for me to understand things. I hope author revise this book carefully and make it more understandable on next edition. I don't want to recommend this book to any beginners.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to follow but hard to understand
Review: If you are used to Adobe CLASS IN A BOOK series, you will like the way this book walks you through examples. This book has great supplement(CD) and examples but it was really hard for me to understand things. I hope author revise this book carefully and make it more understandable on next edition. I don't want to recommend this book to any beginners.
Rating:
Summary: My Flash Schtick
Review: It is hard for me to criticize this book, because the example project is practical and interesting. The directions are pretty straightfoward, giving users a good command of working with 1. layers and 2. media assets like video clips and graphics.
However, this book is not the best for complete Flash beginners for several reasons. First, for complete beginners the Flash work environment is very complicated. My experience with Dreamweaver, Photoshop and HTML carried over only marginally to Flash. The book takes a very plodding approach to acquainting new users to how Flash "works." 120 pages into the book, I felt like I still had no clue WHY the directions were telling me to do certain things. For example, why do I have to put labels on the timeline? Why do I have to switch between different editing modes? etc.
The book is not very well edited, and the instructions themselves could be clearer. For example, the paraphrased step and the instructions that follow it often muddle the point of what you are doing.
For a better understanding of the "what's" and "why's" of Flash, I reccomend the Sam's Teach Yourself book on the subject. It is a better global view of the Flash authoring environment so that beginners can start projects with a better understanding of what you can accheive with Flash. Reviewers seem to enjoy it a lot. Following a better introduction to Flash, I will return to deHaan's book and will likely get more out of it.
Rating:
Summary: My Flash Schtick
Review: It is hard for me to criticize this book, because the example project is practical and interesting. The directions are pretty straightfoward, giving users a good command of working with 1. layers and 2. media assets like video clips and graphics.
However, this book is not the best for complete Flash beginners for several reasons. First, for complete beginners the Flash work environment is very complicated. My experience with Dreamweaver, Photoshop and HTML carried over only marginally to Flash. The book takes a very plodding approach to acquainting new users to how Flash "works." 120 pages into the book, I felt like I still had no clue WHY the directions were telling me to do certain things. For example, why do I have to put labels on the timeline? Why do I have to switch between different editing modes? etc.
The book is not very well edited, and the instructions themselves could be clearer. For example, the paraphrased step and the instructions that follow it often muddle the point of what you are doing.
For a better understanding of the "what's" and "why's" of Flash, I reccomend the Sam's Teach Yourself book on the subject. It is a better global view of the Flash authoring environment so that beginners can start projects with a better understanding of what you can accheive with Flash. Reviewers seem to enjoy it a lot. Following a better introduction to Flash, I will return to deHaan's book and will likely get more out of it.
Rating:
Summary: Not a productive way to learn
Review: It's so hard to choke your way through this material. After four chapters the author has yet to let us run our work to see what we're doing. Tageting your concentration on a single task is a much more effective way to build enterprise applications. There are so many steps on so many pages that you forget some of them or why you did them at all. We spent so much time creating buttons and graphics for the menu in the sample application. But why didn't the author just have us use the new menu object in 2004 pro? I think that the author is used to previous versions of Flash and all of the tricks they had to use. I don't want to learn those tricks. I want to use the new features in Flash today, and I want the features to be simple to use and hard to forget. Tricks seldom work that way. Unfortunately, I think the authors were trying to make this book for both Flash or Flash Pro. If I had to build a menu, and some of the other objects in the book, the way they describe in the book I'd go back to using Java clients and Swing. We bought Pro because we went to be able to build web apps. I want to use Pro. Not all is bad. You can pick up a lot of tips, but there has to be a better way than simply working through the book front to back. You may find yourself gazing at the pages without really concentrating on what you're doing, or searching for the Character button with your wife for several minutes. An audio tape, or a small video in the corner of the screen would go an awful long way towards alleviating some of the pain, and would be much more effective.
Rating:
Summary: Good - but inconsistent on format
Review: The book made for easy reading, and I was able to knock it out in just a few days. The biggest problem I had was the inconsistent way of how the step by step instructions work. At the beginning of each step, they have a "summary" of what you are going to do in bold, then it proceeds to give detailed instructions on how to do it. For the most part, this holds true, but sometimes, the instructions picked up from the bold part, having expected you to have performed that already??? Also found several invalid references to variables.. and other mistakes, such as telling you to add labels to specific frames, before telling you to add keyframes at those positions. It had the feel of a step by step book, that nobody bothered taking the time to test before publishing. Other than that, it was an okay book, and had a realistic in depth example to work with and build upon.
Rating:
Summary: Good - but inconsistent on format
Review: The book made for easy reading, and I was able to knock it out in just a few days. The biggest problem I had was the inconsistent way of how the step by step instructions work. At the beginning of each step, they have a "summary" of what you are going to do in bold, then it proceeds to give detailed instructions on how to do it. For the most part, this holds true, but sometimes, the instructions picked up from the bold part, having expected you to have performed that already??? Also found several invalid references to variables.. and other mistakes, such as telling you to add labels to specific frames, before telling you to add keyframes at those positions. It had the feel of a step by step book, that nobody bothered taking the time to test before publishing. Other than that, it was an okay book, and had a realistic in depth example to work with and build upon.
Rating: 
Summary: Easy to follow
Review: This book seems like a great fit into my learning curve. I really like how easy it is to follow along with and tells me exactly what to do. I'm using regular Flash MX, so I'm happy that I can use the book without upgrading like the other couple books I bought. I hate not being able to follow along and get all confused just to find out I have the wrong Flash or something. I'm only about 3/4 way through the book, but I am very happy with how things are working out. You start out by learning the easy things like graphics, simple animation and so forth and progress through to easy ActionScript, do some things with it and now I'm going through the harder ActionScript. That is intuitive to me, which compels me to write the review. This book is perfect for me starting out with Flash for the first time because I was just plain confused trying to find online tutorials that never spelled it out clearly, and the other books I have that are pretty confusing to try and find what you need. Good work! I finally feel like I'm learning something.
Rating:
Summary: Well written training for Flash MX 2004 authoring
Review: This is one of the best training books I have ever used. The book is targeted at someone with no Flash authoring experience, who wants to learn the most current version of Flash, MX 2004 and the Flash 7 Player. The author picked a sample project which she uses to illustate a wide variety of Flash authoring techniques. ... In addition to teaching the basic technique, the author also explains how to organize and name the parts of the document. The CD ROM has the lesson document in all it's versions, so that you can jump into the lesson sequence at any point. The author understands how to teach. The planning and organization of this book really stands out - you will learn a wide variety of Flash techniques in reasonable amount of time.
Rating:
Summary: Well written training for Flash MX 2004 authoring
Review: This is one of the best training books I have ever used. The book is targeted at someone with no Flash authoring experience, who wants to learn the most current version of Flash, MX 2004 and the Flash 7 Player. The author picked a sample project which she uses to illustate a wide variety of Flash authoring techniques. ... In addition to teaching the basic technique, the author also explains how to organize and name the parts of the document. The CD ROM has the lesson document in all it's versions, so that you can jump into the lesson sequence at any point. The author understands how to teach. The planning and organization of this book really stands out - you will learn a wide variety of Flash techniques in reasonable amount of time.
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