Description:
The subtitle for Director 7 Demystified is "The Official Guide to Macromedia Director, Lingo, and Shockwave." Weighing in at nearly 1,200 pages and including a CD-ROM, this is nothing short of the truth. This massive tome, broken up into three sections, covers Director from top to bottom. The first section alone is worth the price of admission, offering a guided tour of the user interface and the basics of creating animation in Director as well as creating interactive Director "movies" for the Web using Macromedia's Shockwave technology. The finer details of using graphics are explained in chapter 6, which nicely covers some of Director 7's new features such as graphics with alpha channels (for transparency and compositing) and vector graphics (for resolution-independent images and for graphics files that are vastly smaller in size). The second section, "Digging Deeper," assumes you have intermediate Director experience and long for some real production challenges. Rather than being technically intimidating, the book employs a more conversational approach, which really pays off in its discussion of more complicated tools like Lingo, the programming language that is the heart and soul of Director. Section 3, "Special Topics," neatly packages all the loose ends that aren't normally covered: working with multiple Director movies, working with audio, importing digital video, and using and writing Xtras (extensions to Lingo). Most importantly, though, this section teaches you how to debug your Director movies during the development stage using all of Director's built-in tools. And the book doesn't end there--the last part is a reference section with listings for Director resources on the Internet, a Lingo command listing, keyboard shortcuts, and a listing of third-party Director developers. The authors took great pains to make this book complete. It is an ideal volume for beginning to intermediate users, and the Lingo reference section is great for the more advanced user. The only drawback is the immense size and weight of the book. Since it's broken up internally into four major sections, it would have been nice (and more practical) to bundle four smaller volumes as a boxed set, making each one far more physically manageable than the brick that this book is. --Mike Caputo
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