Rating: 
Summary: A NEWBIE IN FLASH
Review: I bought Katherine Ulrich's Visual Quickstart Guide to Flash5, and have found it to be very helpful. With no prior knowledge of animating or flash..i have found this book to be very helpful..giving the basics on such things as timelines, shape and motion tweens,and the general layout/tools of Flash5. After just a few days of reading in my free time, i am able to make simple flash movies and i'm very excited about it. For a total beginner like myself, this book is very good..however, i can admit to not owning any other Flash5 books to compare it with. It doesn't give a lot of help in the area of action scripting..so if you are someone wanting to learn action scripting i'd say to pass this one over and find something else..but for someone just starting out in Flash..this book is good..has many helpful tips and easy to understand!
Rating: 
Summary: Gets the Job Done, but Doesn't Go that Extra Mile
Review: I bought this book because I needed to get up to speed on Flash quickly for work, and I have had a lot of success using the other Quickstart guides. It took me almost 2 weeks to work through the book in my spare time. If the author had taken a more concise approach, I probably would have been able to get through the material in about a week.
On its arrival, my first disappointment with the book was that it's very long (525 pages). This makes it more difficult to work with than most of the other Quickstart books, which are usually around 2-300 pages. I found many of the examples were redundant, and could have been consolidated.
I also feel that this book lacks focus. For example, Chapter 13 is about Scripting, then Chapter 14 is about Sound, then Chapter 15 is about Scripting again. The entire first half of the book is devoted to illustration techniques in great detail. Unfortunately, important subjects like Scripting and Advanced Animation are given short shrift.
Compared to other Quickstart books, I found the author's style wordy. Here is a sample step from page 372 that illustrates my point: "1. Open a new Flash document, or open an existing Flash document to which you want to add buttons." To me, simply saying "1. Open a new Flash document." would have been enough, especially this far into the book. Nevertheless, the teaching by example method is very effective. I found the illustrations and the tips sections especially informative.
It could also have used a better reference section. The only reference material provided is a list of keyboard shortcuts.
This book is for entry-level Flash users. For them, it should get the job done, though in my opinion it could have been more concise. Advanced Flash users (including those migrating from earlier versions) should definitely look elsewhere.
Rating: 
Summary: a very good introduction to flash
Review: I bought this book because it was one of the few available for Flash 5. After working with it for several days I find it one of the best introductory books I have come across for any topic. Flash is a quirky and complicated program, and there are times I would have liked more explanations. But I am so happy that the useful information in this book is not buried in pages of useless examples. This is not a book of samples, ready for you to copy. Nor does it cover advanced scripting topics very well - these could easily double the size of the book. This book is a concise handbook, and an excellent introduction for those that do not require a great deal of hand holding.
Rating:
Summary: Best "Getting Started" book I've read in a long time
Review: I had to buy this as the textbook for a class. At first, I thought a visual quickstart wasn't going to be good enough, so I also ordered an extra book that I thought would be better. But when I read this book, it was surprisingly good. It got me up and running much quicker than most of the other students in the class. (Granted, many of the students probably didn't bother to read any book.)I came to appreciate this book all the more when I read the other book I ordered, "How to Do Everything with Macromedia Flash 5." In my opinion, this Visual Quickstart Guide is by far the better book. Some of the other reviews say this book is not comprehensive enough. True. If you really want to get into the guts of Flash 5, you'll need more. But if you just want to get started, and learn a hell of a lot of useful information along the way, you can't beat this book. P.S. Be sure to go to their Web site and download the example files.
Rating: 
Summary: I do not see any change between Flash 4 book to Flash 5 book
Review: I read the Both books (flash 4 and flash 5) and the taking the same a example and the same pictures and the same words. In short it's the same book.
Rating:
Summary: Very good introductory manual
Review: I'm an old hand at web design, Photoshop and animated GIFs, but found myself completely at a loss when confronted with Flash for the first time. Therefore I was delighted by this book! Yes, it's for complete novices, but is in no way condescending. Anyone from a complete computer novice to an experienced graphics professional will feel comfortable learning from this book. Using a well-paced lesson plan, it brings the novice up to the level of competent basic Flash designer, and ready and itching to get into the harder stuff. Though I can't compare it to other beginner's guides to Flash 5, I feel this book adequately covers it all, and is also less expensive than most of the others. Highly recommended.
Rating:
Summary: Learn Flash 5 Now!
Review: If you are desperate to learn Flash 5 now then get this book. It's full of explanations, diagrams and exercises that reveal some crucial features of Flash. If you are trying to learn Flash with just the manual and you are not an expert, and you're unsure which book to get, this book's for you!
Rating:
Summary: Great book for beginners
Review: If you have no experience at all using Flash, this will be a good place to start...all the basic subjects of Flash, from the basic graphic creation using fill and strokes to tweening animation and publising movies, are well explained in the book. The only thing that makes it fall short of an excellent book is the very limited amount of information and examples on Actions/ActionScript at the end of the book which might confuse some novices on the subject. The book doesnt cover the more advanced features of Flash, so if you've already aquired most of the basics, you might wanna look elsewhere. If you do get lost at the last few chapters about assigning actions, a good online primer on Javascript can help you grasp the concept.
Rating:
Summary: This is a Great Book; Don't let anyone tell you it's not
Review: In general, I feel that all the Visual Quickstart Books are excellent. I have a growing library myself. With the Flash 5 Book the reading is easy. There aren't any long, attention-drifting-away paragraphs. You could look at the examples and experiment with them to fit your needs. For example, I used an exercise in Animating Color Effects to teach myself how to make text that fades in and out. The best thing about these books is that they are 100% proofread. Yeah, some people complain that the books are too simplistic. I say to those 1) What more do you want? These books give a wealth of information for under $25 and 2) quit trying to come off as an expert user of Flash/Photoshop/etc... The Bottom Line is that these are great books.
Rating: 
Summary: Too plain, need some exercises
Review: It is a book for beginners who know little about computer graphic. It doesn't give you much besides what you can do with the tools. You can't expect to find any special tips in this book. Too plain. Don't know why the instructor suggested this book. It is not as great as he told us.
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