Macromedia Flash MX Professional 2004 Application Development : Training from the Source

Rating:
Summary: Great Flash Book for Learning and Using OOP principals
Review: When it comes to flash books on the market I always see them segmented into different things: Animation, Games, ActionScript, or Design related. There are a limited amount of books available for someone looking at flash for pure application development.

This book is great if you come from a middleware programming background (as I did) with languages such as ColdFusion, ASP, or PHP. Flash MX 2004 Professional gives you a wonderful palate of components to make your application development much easier, but with that power comes the responsibility of learning ActionScript 2.0 (a strongly typed Object Oriented Programming Language). For many people without the benefit of any kind of OOP background, this book will be crucial to teach you the principals and apply them to your application.

If you already have OOP background, there is nothing stopping you from starting anywhere you wish in the book, the contents on the DVD that accompanies the book contains solutions to each section so all you have to do is pick up one section back from where you want to start, and move forward. Those that complain about constantly saving the files or moving them, it's because you are going from start to end of the book and debugging your application might be tricky so it's helpful to have the solutions there at each section so you can compare where you may have gone wrong.

Jeanette Stallons is a talented trainer / author and she does a great job in this book of getting the principals out there with easy to use examples and lots and lots of great information. This is a huge book and an excellent learning guide.