Rating: 
Summary: Good Content; Poor tutorials
Review: I have purchased many computer books over the last 12 years. This one was not one of the better written ones. I was very excited to get this book since I have worked with both XML and Flash, but have never tied them together. While the content of each chapter is sufficiently laid out, the material is not explained very well. The authors use a project("The Quiz") that is developed troughout the book. Problem is that the steps for creating the various stages are poorly written and takes several readings to understand what they are doing. The book does not come with a source code CD-ROM as described by Addison Wesley and the website for the book has problems when attempting to download the source. Very frustrating.
Rating: 
Summary: A confusing book
Review: I have purchased this book as a recommended text for a university course and have been disappointed. The text covers the topics I needed to understand, but in a confusing manner - there is plenty of irrelevant content which is meant to build your understanding until optimal solutions are developed at the end of each chapter. I have found this to create more confusion than the benefit it delivers. It is not that good for a beginner as the early part is poorly written. It does get better though in the later chapters, so more experienced readers may gain some benefit. Overall I did not find it very readable and have begun using other texts to understand the individual various topics before tackling this text.
Rating:
Summary: A disappointing tome
Review: I have to agree with other users who point out the book's awkward construction. It's sort of a mutant blend of a hands-on how-to book and a broader discussion of Flash and XML. As the authors ramble through the creation of an XML-based quiz engine, they abruptly propose different ways of addressing coding issues, then move on to the discussion of another coding aspect without telling you which of the two or three or four options you should have plugged in in order for the next set of code to work with it.
By mid-2004 this approach is even more awkward as you discover that some of the hands-on steps they tell you to carry out no longer work in Flash MX or Flash MX 2004; there's nothing on the cover or the introductory material to warn you that the authors wrote this for Flash 5.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Book, worth every cent!
Review: I like this book for a few different reasons:
The pace...it's just right for an experienced developer coming to PHP-MySQL for the first time.
The level...is perfect with a mix of foundational information and real world activity. (one can choose to skip the XML and SQL intro's easy enough and move to the usage of these tools)
The price...better than some $60USD Flash/SQL books I already own.
The humor...makes the content even more enjoyable.
Dov and Jesse did a fine job, showing how Flash can be turned into a useful data container using open source solutions.
Rating:
Summary: Not perfect, but decent
Review: Note: this is a Flash 5 book. It contains no Flash MX content. There are significant changes to Flash in the MX version that make some of this book outdated. This book would be ideal for someone who already knows a bit about each topic: actionscript, php, sql, but hasn't built anything with those languages yet. Maybe a Flash coder who's worked with a server-side programmer on a project, and now has to work alone? It's decently written, with an occasional sense of humor. The writing is terse, and you won't get more than one explanation of each concept. The information comes thick and fast, with discussions of server protocols, mySQL, and PHP diving right in. Basic introductory material is brief or non-existant. In fact, if you don't already know something about PHP, you couldn't get any of this stuff to work, as you'll have to know how and where to put it on the server. One very big problem is that there's almost no distinction between "code we're showing you to illustrate a concept" and "code that's part of the application we're building." The authors will often just toss a couple of lines of code into a page, and it turns out to be something that needs to get added deep within a script you've been writing. Miss that line and everything will break. The Flash code is good, although I wondered why the authors occassionaly used the ancient setProperty syntax and "eq" operators from Flash 4. You can get this book easily for about a third of the list price, and for that it's certainly worth it, if for nothing but a good introduction to the concepts here.
Rating: 
Summary: A very stimulating Flash book, but you have to work.
Review: One of my favorite Flash books. This one was a lot of fun to follow along, and I found some of their ideas very exciting. The book does assume that the reader has some experience working with Flash, as they don't give you a lot of "click this, then click that" kind of instruction. And you'll need to think along with them, and puzzle out what they mean in a few places. You'll build a quiz game, and continually improve it's hard-coded, inflexible nature, into one entirely driven by XML data. Flash and XML will appeal, I think, more to developers, rather than to those who are interested more in cartooning or web effects, and the book has obviously been written by very technical people, and yet very creative people. In addition, I would say that I loved the high quality paper and the welcome addition of color. The book feels and looks great and it is appreciated to find such an interesting and attractive computer book with only a [$] cover price. If they will improve some of the more confusing parts with some additional explanations and illustrations in a second edition, I'll have to give them five stars.
Rating:
Summary: Great book on Flash & XML
Review: This book is a great tutorial on both Flash and XML that brings you up to speed on both technologies with clear and concise explanations. In addition, this book presents a number of important Web technologies, including PHP, MySQL, and sockets. It shows how to work with these technologies to create n-tier, interactive systems that access the full resources of the Internet. Worth every single penny!
Rating:
Summary: Flash finally gets serious
Review: This is far and away the best set of paradigms for using Flash in a client-server environment that I have seen. It is not a cookbook, and it doesn't provide a lot of cut-and-paste applications. What it does very well, is to demonstrate how to create a user interface that can access a multi-tiered web system. It is not intended for someone who has neither handled web services nor used Flash. Its examples transfer well to newer versions of Flash, and to environments other than the models used by the authors -- including those that use enterprise-level programming languages and databases. Some of the discussion may be either too elementary or irrelevant for some readers -- you probably shouldn't be reading this if you've never seen XML or SQL, and the details of the PHP examples aren't terribly interesting if you are handling the server side with something else. However, the details do provide concrete examples, and explain where Flash fits into the mix, and what it can and cannot do. I wish this book had existed when Flash 5 first came out -- it would have saved days of my life, and a lot of hair pulling. I hope that it will be updated.
Rating:
Summary: Flash finally gets serious
Review: This is far and away the best set of paradigms for using Flash in a client-server environment that I have seen. It is not a cookbook, and it doesn't provide a lot of cut-and-paste applications. What it does very well, is to demonstrate how to create a user interface that can access a multi-tiered web system. It is not intended for someone who has neither handled web services nor used Flash. Its examples transfer well to newer versions of Flash, and to environments other than the models used by the authors -- including those that use enterprise-level programming languages and databases. Some of the discussion may be either too elementary or irrelevant for some readers -- you probably shouldn't be reading this if you've never seen XML or SQL, and the details of the PHP examples aren't terribly interesting if you are handling the server side with something else. However, the details do provide concrete examples, and explain where Flash fits into the mix, and what it can and cannot do. I wish this book had existed when Flash 5 first came out -- it would have saved days of my life, and a lot of hair pulling. I hope that it will be updated.
Rating:
Summary: A fine book, but with a glitch or two
Review: This is the right book if you are a technologist/programmer interested in learning to work with flash rather than the usually assumed Photoshop jockey who just wants to know enough to put a few buttons in an animation. For a programmer, having to use menus and buttons to insert code is maddeningly slow and frustrating, and this book finally made it clear to me how to actually write scripts (and use the menus if necessary). The project for the tutorial is a good choice - just enough graphics to get one's feet wet, not enough to be distracting. And this book is funny, and very readable. However, the tutorial isn't quite as clear as it looks - in some places the terminology or instructions are slightly different from the menus, or just a bit incomplete. Flash jockeys will probably not notice - but as a newcomer to flash, I got stuck on the most ridiculously simple things. The silver lining was that I learned a lot figuring them out. You will want the Flash documentation handy to supplement.
| 
