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Rating: 
Summary: Okay, but cluttered presentation
Review: A person who does something well isn't always the most qualified to write well about it. On the credit side, this book does take one from the basics to more advanced practices. BUT: 1. A project is presented 'as is' -- numbered steps of 'do this', 'do that'. The trouble is that I didn't feel that I came out of the experience with much of a feeling of understanding or comprehension so that I could repeat the process in another setting. 2. Several of the tasks were repetitive to the point of losing the point. Instead of learning about one or two buttons that accomplished a task, there were eight spread across two 'pages', with each button merely a slight variation of the process to be learned. 3. A more creative layout of the book with, say, diagrams illustrating the steps, could have made things better, and would have provided a more complete overview of each project. 4. Working with Flash 4 means learning a somewhat different jargon. Her 'glossary' leaves out some pretty important stuff like 'Tell Target', what it's supposed to do, and when to use it. Most things were not explained at all, in fact, as in why her settings for .wav files as opposed to the default settings. A discussion of this in general would have been very helpful. 5. While this book has useful material, I will look to other books for more comprehensive information.
Rating: 
Summary: "not-so-essential" Flash 4!
Review: As an advanced Flash user and working web/graphics professional I would say that this book is not essential for web professionals. I didn't learn a thing from this book, I've learned much more from many other Flash books, but not this one! This book covered very little in a very complicated manner. I was dissapointed with the complex way in which simple concepts were explained. I would not recommend this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Good for beginners but you will need another book also
Review: Fairly easy to follow, except that some of the steps make you think "WHAT??" and you have to read it over to understand. Seems that some steps are missing when they are explaining a process you may have already done in a past chapter. The one thing that bothered me the most is that pages you apply to one finished webpage are missing from the phptr.com site. Ok, enough rants..It was very helpful to learn basic and advanced steps and I'd recommend it!
Rating:
Summary: "not-so-essential" Flash 4!
Review: I had to make a dynamic website under a tight deadline. The book served very beneficial for abeginner like me who virtually knew nothing about using flash or how it worked. The book teaches everything from scratch. The first 5 chapters are the most useful in the book. I would highly recommend the book for someone who is new to this technology.
Rating:
Summary: recommended for beginners
Review: I had to make a dynamic website under a tight deadline. The book served very beneficial for abeginner like me who virtually knew nothing about using flash or how it worked. The book teaches everything from scratch. The first 5 chapters are the most useful in the book. I would highly recommend the book for someone who is new to this technology.
Rating:
Summary: Great for beginners
Review: I prefer to have several books on one subject, if you can not find some information in one book , there is every time a possibility to find it in another book, but this one so useless. It is almost impossible to do exercise because step-by-step described in this book just doesn't work. Also if you trying to work with downloadable exercises they are sometimes absolutely different from book information. For example button action. You can reed in the book (p.76): "By changing the spheres to buttons in the middle and last keyframe, and leaving the first keyframe as a graphic, we are telling Flash to treat them as buttons after the 15-th keyframe..." But in download example all three keyframes are buttons. This example work fine, but yours made from book working very strange. I would suggest for beginners and intermediate buying "Flash for Windows and Macintosh (Visual Quickstart Guide)".
Rating: 
Summary: Good tutorial
Review: In most ways this is a typical tutorial book. Talk about a feature . . . work on a project using the feature. The exercises were pretty good and so were the explanations. If you are already good at Flash, this may not be a good choice of books, as it doesn't get very advanced. One thing I like about this book is that the publishers have all of the source files for download on a web site (as opposed to putting them on a CD). You'll notice that this book is considerably cheaper than similar books. When you download the files, you have the choice of loading them one at a time, as you need them, or you can download them all at once (packed into a zip archive). The one thing that sets this tutorial apart from others is that it makes available, the source files for the projects at every step of the way. As I complete tutorials, I like to experiment a lot. It was very useful to have these source files to resort to in times that my experimentation totally screwed up the project. If you are a beginner or intermediate at Flash I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Good tutorial
Review: In most ways this is a typical tutorial book. Talk about a feature . . . work on a project using the feature. The exercises were pretty good and so were the explanations. If you are already good at Flash, this may not be a good choice of books, as it doesn't get very advanced. One thing I like about this book is that the publishers have all of the source files for download on a web site (as opposed to putting them on a CD). You'll notice that this book is considerably cheaper than similar books. When you download the files, you have the choice of loading them one at a time, as you need them, or you can download them all at once (packed into a zip archive). The one thing that sets this tutorial apart from others is that it makes available, the source files for the projects at every step of the way. As I complete tutorials, I like to experiment a lot. It was very useful to have these source files to resort to in times that my experimentation totally screwed up the project. If you are a beginner or intermediate at Flash I recommend this book.
Rating:
Summary: Very Good Book for beginners.
Review: This is a really well written book for those who want to learn Flash and had no prior experience with it. After this you might want to get some other book to learn more about it, but for beginners this is the book to start from.
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