Rating: 
Summary: Nice, hefty Flash MX book.
Review: Great book! A nice, hearty desk-side reference while working with Flash MX. I started skipping around the book getting bits and pieces of information I needed, but now I'm going through it chapter, by chapter, doing the lessons. I have learned a lot, and finally understand some of the more advanced parts of ActionScript.
Rating:
Summary: Great Learning Tool
Review: Here's the deal, if you need to learn Flash MX - than this book is worth taking a look at. The way that it was written, really make topics clear. In fact, I never used Flash before and after spending about ten days with this book, I made a complete Flash web site. I can not only create animations and cool interface elements...but I UNDERSTAND actionscript. I have looked at other books, and while I don't doubt the authors know their stuff - they don't show and teach you how to use Flash like this book. However, there are errors in this book which have held me up. I was lucky enough to have contacted the some of authors and they did answer my questions. I do give this book 5 stars for the content. If you are not good at problem solving - I regretfully have to say pass it up. Like some other Sams books the technical editors and proof readers were out to lunch.
Rating: 
Summary: Exactly what I was looking for
Review: I am a programmer from Germany and looking for anything that helps me to get into Flash MX because it is one of the hot topics here. Especially ActionScript is important to me right now and this book offered me a lot of great insights. Thanks to these authors I gained some great skills, I feel like having advanced several levels! Waiting for more books like this over here!
Rating: 
Summary: Good potential but numerous, inexcusable errors
Review: I am a web developer with some experience in Flash 5. I bought this book on the strength of its reviews here. At first it seemed like what I needed--a review of techniques and lots of scripting to get me jump-started in MX. As I was browsing the first few chapters I started to notice some crucial omissions in the exercises. Key steps like creating symbols and adding keyframes without which the exercise would fail. I figured them out and moved on. I downloaded the tutorial files from the site and decided to try an exercise in Ch 7 (starting on page 167). It instructs you to create a 500x300 movie to match the one you're working in--ok except that the one you're working in is 425x325! You then are asked to place a bitmap graphic into that file. Diagram 7.17 on pg 171 shows that it's supposed to measure 450x285 so it can fit nicely into the rest of the layout--it actually measures 450x303 which causes it to overlap the navigation! So I resized it and forged on. Next you're supposed to add an action to the "About Us" button--there is no such button. OK moving along. The hit state of the next button is the text itself--very hard to click on and exactly what the author warns against on pg 109. The next exercise (pg 174) asks you to select a movieclip called slide-show from the provided unleashed.fla library--the movie clip isn't there. I could go on but I think I've made my point. Those reviewers who gave this book a high rating obviously did not try this exercise and are willing to excuse other myriad errors. Perhaps things improve in the later chapters but the authors have been extremely careless and I am going to return this book before it wastes any more of my time.
Rating:
Summary: Avoid
Review: I bought this on the high street yesterday and I'm taking it back today. The book is full of errors and I already wasted an hour debugging two of their examples. It's just unacceptable. Look at the code halfway down page 599. There are at least 4 showstopping bugs in just 9 lines of code. At the bottom of page 622 the reader is instructed to download the files for one project from <INSERT DOWNLOAD SITE HERE>. I guess they never got round to inserting it. This edition feels like an early draft of what might have been a decent volume, but I'm not paying this amount of money to have my time wasted. I'm a programmer - not a designer. I think that in the hands of anyone who doesn't know how to approach broken code and fix it, this book would likely cause a lot of frustration and dissuade them from continuing. Please avoid.
Rating:
Summary: Flash MX is easy
Review: I chose this book because I have been pleased with books from Sams Publishing in the past. They have completely fallen down on this one. There are numerous typographical errors, including ones in the exercises which will cause your movie not to work. Plus, the content one is supposed to download from their site to use in the exercises does not match (at all, in some cases) what's in the book. For example, you're supposed to download a button that looks like a speaker. What you get is a large letter X. And in another example, you're supposed to download an image with space for a navigation bar at the bottom of the image - instead you get an image with space for a navigation bar at the side. Skip this book unless you wish to spend more time trying to figure out what the authors *meant* to say than you spend actually learning Flash. I am by no means a novice user and I use both Director and Dreamweaver, and even given that background, I found this book to be completely frustrating and bordering on useless.
Rating:
Summary: Hire a proofreader!
Review: I chose this book because I have been pleased with books from Sams Publishing in the past. They have completely fallen down on this one. There are numerous typographical errors, including ones in the exercises which will cause your movie not to work. Plus, the content one is supposed to download from their site to use in the exercises does not match (at all, in some cases) what's in the book. For example, you're supposed to download a button that looks like a speaker. What you get is a large letter X. And in another example, you're supposed to download an image with space for a navigation bar at the bottom of the image - instead you get an image with space for a navigation bar at the side. Skip this book unless you wish to spend more time trying to figure out what the authors *meant* to say than you spend actually learning Flash. I am by no means a novice user and I use both Director and Dreamweaver, and even given that background, I found this book to be completely frustrating and bordering on useless.
Rating:
Summary: shame, shame, shame... waste of time and money
Review: i give this book(?) a minus 5-star rating... this book is waste of money. you would be well served elsewhere. examples are not finished. tutorials are not complete. its home-page is slow to download files... all and all, take my advice and spend your hard-earned money for another book. i wrote pizzi a few letters that were never replied properly. shame on all the people who have put this book "together." why they have bothered to do so is beyond me...
Rating: 
Summary: INCORRECT TUTORIAL
Review: I have just begun reading the book, and on the simplest example, there are incorrect steps. I know A LITTLE about the concepts used in Flash, so I was able to get around the tutorial, but I would not recommend this book. How are you to know what is right or wrong if you have never seen it before? It is obvioulsy hard to tell if a book is accurate until you have spent your money, so choose wisely!
Rating:
Summary: INCORRECT TUTORIAL
Review: I have just begun reading the book, and on the simplest example, there are incorrect steps. I know A LITTLE about the concepts used in Flash, so I was able to get around the tutorial, but I would not recommend this book. How are you to know what is right or wrong if you have never seen it before? It is obvioulsy hard to tell if a book is accurate until you have spent your money, so choose wisely!
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