Rating: 
Summary: Great book
Review: I've read a lot of Flash tutorials and this is by far, one of the best well written books yet. The author offers great explanation and the lessons are great! I recommend this to anyone learning Flash or to keep as a reference book
Rating:
Summary: Best tutorial I've taken
Review: I've taken a number of software tutorials and this one was the best. First, the exercises were short ones so I could walk away from the computer and come back and not be lost. Second, I found very few errors in the book, and the ones I did find were non- tutorial-affecting. I've taken far too many tutorials in which the files weren't available on the CD or the lesson didn't work as described or there were glaring grammatical or spelling errors throughout.I liked this book a lot because it didn't spend as much time on the graphics aspect of Flash as other books do (and then they spend too little time on the animation aspect). I've dinked around with the program before. Now I feel I have a sound background in the program. This is one of the few tutorials I have ever completed; it's the first Flash one I have. The projects held my interest and showed me things about the program that I hadn't yet discovered. I recommend this book to any beginner and anyone who has played around with the program but doesn't have a good grasp on its capabilities.
Rating:
Summary: Best Tutorial Book I've Ever Bought
Review: I've tried 3 or 4 other books while trying to learn Flash over the last two years. This is the one that finally got me way up the learning curve. Overpriced? No, I don't think so. The authors and editors put in a helluva lot of work on this book, breaking the subject matter into digestible lessons and then double-checking the tutorials. I've paid as much for other books that taught me nothing (because they weren't user-friendly and didn't keep my interest) and paid six times as much for one-day courses that were excellent but 50% forgotten a week later. I see some of the other reviewers complain that the book does a little too much hand-holding and baby-talking. Well, if you haven't got much going on in your life, then I suppose you can teach yourself Flash by trial-and-error and by trying to read the inscrutable Macromedia manuals. The rest of us, with real lives, really need and appreciate the baby-step tutorials and extras on the CD. The authors are teachers and seem to be warm human beings as well. I would not only recommend this book, I'd look forward to taking real, live classes from them.
Rating: 
Summary: Great for absolute beginners
Review: If you have never even opened Flash, then this is a great step-by-step tutorial book. The bad thing about this book is that 90% of it just duplicates what's freely available in the Flash help files. The bottom line: it illuminates (what should be) obvious!
Rating:
Summary: Top Notch
Review: If you have no experience in Flash, this book is what you need. This book takes you from the basics to the intermediate futures of Flash.
Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners
Review: If you have no experience in Flash, this book is what you need. This book takes you from the basics to the intermediate futures of Flash.
Rating: 
Summary: Get's you quickly on your way to authoring Flash
Review: Prior to acquiring this book, I had no experience with any type of automation software. This book is structured so you can jump right in an starting learning from succinct yet powerful tutorials. The author's writing style is excellent .. it is not often that you find a technical book that captivates you and reads so easy as this one. Alot of technical books are made up of repeats of the examples that ship with the product, followed by a mundane rehash of every little feature in every nook and cranny of the product. Not this one! Within minutes, you can easily see that this book is created by an artist with real world experience in creating powerful animations/content with Flash. You'll feel your competance growing with every chapter. My only suggestion to the author would be to move the text chapter up a little sooner in the book, maybe before the ActionScript section.
Rating:
Summary: good, but not complete
Review: The book gives clear step-by step instructions on most Flash 5 functions. However, the book does not give clear instructions on how to create navigation buttons. I had to spend hours of trial and error. Nor does the book explain how to make input boxes and provide feedback for an educational program. I am having to purchase a few more Flash 5 manuals and hope that at least one of those manuals will help me.
Rating:
Summary: Good beginner stepXstep quality. Poor how to usefully apply.
Review: The quality of the materials is very good (5 stars) for a beginner to learn Flash features but not applications. Do not buy if your goal is to understand how to make useful Flash movies quickly. After reviewing many, I selected this one for a 15 week junior college credit interactive design course I have taught for 7 years for content quality, error free step by step exercises, and beginner level. I am now in the process of breaking the chapters apart and rearranging into a useful course outline so students can use Flash quickly. The book suffers from emphasizing teaching features and not applications; i.e., how to put it all together, until the last 1/4 of the book. This means you will spend about four hundred pages learning details about Flash, many of which are not needed to put together useful applications such as a banner ad, cartoon, or a page based Flash site. A good example is the color diatribe in the first chapters. The color knowlege is not going to have anything to do with your ability to put together a Flash movie and would have been better near the end of the book. However, there are no other books I found in 12/2001 that give the beginner a quick trip to useful applications that I would like in my course, so at this writing this is your best choice for a step by step exercise beginner book because of the quality. After you use this I then recommend Macromedia Flash 5 Training From The Source, not for a beginners, with Chrissey Rey as the next best step by step exercise book.
Rating:
Summary: a good way to teach yourself flash
Review: They say you can't always judge a book by its cover...but you can judge it by its title, at least in this case. The book teaches you Flash through hands on exercises. It is not a reference book. It will not teach you how to be a great designer. It will teach you how to use the program effectively. It does that very well. If you want to get a reference or design book, I would look elsewhere.
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