Rating: 
Summary: Bad grammer and typos, but lost of content!
Review: Friends of Ed are not exactly known for their editorial skills as well as for their proof reading (neither am I, I should warn). But there is a lot of content. I just wish the material were explained better and the materials overview were more structured, so one could easily return to the book and find bits and pieces more easily. Other than that it has some great examples. I gave it 4 stars, not for the typos, but rather for the lack of clarity. So, if you need someone to hold your hand and walk you through, this might not be the ideal book for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Another good actionscript book by FOE
Review: Friends of Ed has been publishing great books on Macromedia Flash consistently in the recent months, and this one actually has some fundamental coverage like concept design and project structure then moved on to advance topics such as XML integration, Generator, etc. Basically a little bit of everything starting from the intermediate level Flash developers can use. My only complaints is the black and white printing, and no CD-Roms, but all the source files can be download from Friends of Ed's web site. Keep up the good work FOE!
Rating: 
Summary: Poor Support For Known errors!
Review: I am currently working on Chapter 3 of this book. The book instructs you to create a lot of very cool things. In chapter 3 you work on building a hierarchical menu utilizing arrays and for loops. Very cool right?Think again! At one point the book instructs you to test your movie as it should now be functional. I did so only to find out that it was not. I headed over to the friends of ed website, and did a search in the their forums. Apparently this is a problem everyone is having. The author responded by saying that he knew it was a problem but would only fix it AFTER he finished his next book! Unreal. Do not buy this [junk].
Rating:
Summary: Poor Support For Known errors!
Review: I am currently working on Chapter 3 of this book. The book instructs you to create a lot of very cool things. In chapter 3 you work on building a hierarchical menu utilizing arrays and for loops. Very cool right? Think again! At one point the book instructs you to test your movie as it should now be functional. I did so only to find out that it was not. I headed over to the friends of ed website, and did a search in the their forums. Apparently this is a problem everyone is having. The author responded by saying that he knew it was a problem but would only fix it AFTER he finished his next book! Unreal. Do not buy this [junk].
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointment from the ED group
Review: I bought this book with the intention of learning more in depth use of actionscript with all of its wonders...Instead, I was bombarded with too much game design stuff. The table of contents was misleading and the focus of the book was useless for true web design. There are many books out there for actionscript, I suggest any of the others.
Rating:
Summary: Challenging ActionScript Book
Review: I had a tough time in the third chapter of this book, troubleshooting code is a reality,
and the satisfaction of successful coding, is only matched by the frustration of not "getting" it.
By chapter 5 I was delighted to find, the size of the problems are relatively small and easy to digest,
even though they cover some pretty complicated material
in my view, and
there seems a ton of useful stuff in here.
Good, but Challenging. IMHO
Rating:
Summary: Simply the best
Review: I was looking for a book for teaching myself ActionScript. I'm an advanced user of Flash 4, but Flash 5's ActionScript was cumbersome for me. So I buyed some books, and this is by all the means the best. It starts with an intermediate level. The explanations are clear, and my only complain is the absence of a CD, but you can always download the code from their web. If you consider yourself an intermediate user of other script languages and want a solid foundation in ActionScript, buy this book. If you have no previous experience, buy the Foundation ActionScript. I also own from the same Editorial Flash 5 Studio and Flash 5 Dynamic Content Studio. All of them, five stars books!
Rating:
Summary: Good examples
Review: OK, we are talking FLASH here, and that means the authors are designers, not coders...and so from that perspective, this book is pretty good, because working through the examples will give anyone a good stock of techniques...and on Flash ActionScript content it gets good marks.
If someone was to grade this book not on Flash ideas but on technical accuracy, then it would not do too well...because there are glaring non-Flash errors...Topology (incorrectly defined by the authors) typically has only an indirect effect on forces, despite the fact that Topologists have studied chaos using topological methods...Geometry and curvature are the major relevant math fields here...
The identity matrix is written down wrong...obvious to those who know matrices but will just confuse others, but really the whole matrix discussion shows little understanding of the underlying principals of linear transformations and is just a cook book approach. The rotation matrices are written down, but there is not even a diagram to define the angles phi and theta...Do the authors even realize that the conventions for these angles vary depending if it is a math book or physics book? Certainly a beginner should be given a diagram for clarity. Granted, these are non-Flash issues, but they need to be mentioned...The introduction of 3d rotations will only be of value to those who have already studied them in either Mechanics or Engineering, again due the cookbook nature (and the errors and ambiguities) in which they are presented... ...still, a good book for learning ActionScript techniques and certainly recommended, but consult the math and physics books for applied math and physics!
Rating:
Summary: Challenging ActionScript Book
Review: Reading this book was like trying to learn trig on acid; it jumps around all over the place without ever trying to establish any clear points. It will start discussing one topic and without any conclusion or in depth explanation go on to the next topic. I found that very frustrating. It seems as if the writer(s) cannot write a clear and logical set of instructions. Do not buy this book unless you are an expert in Actionscript, and in that case you won't probably need it anyhow.
Rating:
Summary: Mixing Flash and LSD
Review: Reading this book was like trying to learn trig on acid; it jumps around all over the place without ever trying to establish any clear points. It will start discussing one topic and without any conclusion or in depth explanation go on to the next topic. I found that very frustrating. It seems as if the writer(s) cannot write a clear and logical set of instructions. Do not buy this book unless you are an expert in Actionscript, and in that case you won't probably need it anyhow.
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