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Summary: General guide to Dynamic Flash Sites
Review: Content Studio would be a good book if it went into more depth on the topics detailed inside. Dynamic Studio tries to do too much. You will find that the book will give you a general understanding of a topic but this will then need to be followed up with some more detailed research (which to me defeats the purpose of buying the book in the first place!).I have also noticed that all the 'Friends of Ed' publications are rather repetitive of each other. If you buy the whole set of books you will see recurring examples, explanations and ideas frequently, especially in regards to the Action Scripting Topics. Again, as detailed in my review on 'Foundation Actionscripting' by Sham Bhangal in the same series, I would suspect they are selling more on appearance rather than content. Do not even attempt to buy Dynamic Studio if you think it will help you design a fully functional dynamic Flash site. All the book will do will introduce technologies that you could use to build such a site and give brief examples on their use.
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Summary: A good book for site builders
Review: Flash dynamic studio is an Excellent book that teach you how to make wonderful web pages.
If your job is related with internet, you should see it because it has a lot of useful information that will help you in the design of impressive and interactive internet sites.
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Summary: the Missing LINK (backend)
Review: I've been looking for a books for backend for over a year now. This is the PHP, ASP, PERL, JavaScript, Generator, PHP Turbine dream book! 1000 pages of MUST-KNOW knowledge for the serious flash designer/developer. The PHP section is what I've been searching for for months as I've been stumbling through integration for a month now. This will become the "BIBLE for BACKEND" (sounds sexual, I guess) Flash. Flash IS the future. This is the book I will refer to most for the next year... guaranteed. my "most advised purchase" to date for Flash Developers. Better than Flash 5 Magic at describing Backend application integration. This will set you apart from the hacks.
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Summary: Awesome Resource on my desk
Review: I've been working with Flash since version 3, I teach Flash to mostly beginning level individuals. When they ask me what other books they could move on to from the course this book has entered the top 5 of my recommendations. This book is solid. As for the guy who gave it a 1 star rating because it is Windows based... HEEEELLLLLLOOOOOOOO!!!! How many books have I struggled through interpretting Mac clicks into Windows clicks? I just go for the content. Besides most of the content here is for advanced users who don't necessarily need where to click and ctrl click etc... they use it for the code and the integration with different systems.
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Summary: The Best Flash Book in the World!
Review: I've bought numerous books on Flash and the Dynamic Scripting that can be intermingled with Flash.... Flash 5 ActionScript F/X and Design, Flash 4 Creative Web Animation, and different Wrox books on ASP, ASP databases, and ADO. This book ties ALL of them together. It explains motion scripting for beginners, and then it shows how to import variables from ASP, PHP, Perl, and Cold Fusion. These 1000+ pages contain EVERYTHING you want to know about Flash, it it with out a doubt, THE BEST FLASH BOOK EVER CREATED!!!! It even branches out Flash to other programs like Dreamweaver UltraDev and Generator, it explains how to display information from databases using Flash Turbine. If you read this book, you will be a master at Flash.
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Summary: definitely for beginner
Review: If you are a newbie,......their are other alternatives that will get your feet wet, but if you are a practicing Flash developer and have a firm understanding of ActionScript...this book will inspire you to build real dynamic Flash apps. It touches on Flash Javascript methods, Flash and textfiles and goes into server side middleware solutions like, CGI,Perl and PHP. It also introduces you to database integration. This book gives you real world solutions, which maybe a bit elementary, but overall it lays the foundation for you. I found this book to be inspiring and to be the book which pushed me to learn CGI,PERL,PHP and MySQL. If your looking to build real dynamic/interactive Flash applications or websites this is the book.
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Summary: No testing, and therefore a teaching failure
Review: this is a beast of a book. A really nice solution for anything to do with text and Flash. Database integration, ASP, PHP, HTML.
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Summary: Amazin' book for Dynamic Flash
Review: This is one of the best books you would ever find on dynamic flash that is if you find any other book on that topic.First there are very limited books on individual topics like generator or asp-flash but this books goes a step ahead and collaborates all the aspects of dynamic studio .chapters like ultradev,generator,asp-flash and Flash-turbine .A must read for all those people who are interested in making dynamic websites.They should refer to this book as it would make their work very easy.The book starts off by taking into consideration that the reader is a beginer and then graduates to more advanced topics. Hats off !! to all those who made this book possible as this book is goin to be there for a long time to come.
Rating: 
Summary: Don't Drop it on Your Foot.
Review: This is quite a thing. It's definately the first 1000+ book on using Flash with database-driven content. It's great that you get a thousand pages and more than a dozen authors for your fifty bucks. But what you get in size you lose in depth. There's probably something for everyone here: using Flash with ASP, Perl, PHP, and ColdFusion. There are sections on Access, mySQL, and basic database design. If that's not enough you get some Flash games programming and a quite good appendix about object-oriented-programming in Flash (available as a sample chapter at the publisher's website). Trouble is, there's something for everyone here. Do Flash developers really need to know all those server-side languages? Most of the chapters cover the same techniques for formatting data for Flash, albeit using the different languages above. Without a guiding idea that would structure the book as a series of concepts that build on each other, the book comes across as a series of remixes of the same basic thing: Perl scrips that search a database and return a urlencoded set of values, ASP scripts that search a database and return a urlencoded set of values, ColdFusion scripts that search...and so on. There's enough here on server-side programming to make you dangerous, but there's a reason that Perl (or ASP or PHP) books themselves can run a thousand pages. There are some exceptions: coverage of both Flash ASP Turbine and Macromedia Generator break up the sameness of the book, and the section on XML looks good. But some of the other chapters seem out of place: some ho-hum "interfaces that move around" chapters and two chapters about building space-shoot-em-up games. It's too bad that there's really nothing that teaches you the _really_ hard thing: how to design for the experience of continuous interaction with changeable, remote data. Not the technical stuff like adding a text box that gets filled with "UserName," but what you might want to say to "UserName" and what she might want to do with all that data anyway.
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Summary: Inconsistent ActionScript plagues series
Review: While the idea behind the Friends of Ed series is admirable and useful - that is, to cover the broad and expansive areas of Flash development that are not so well documented elsewhere - the books so far have been spoiled by the inconsistent quality of their ActionScript. Too often, I get the feeling that authors that have been invited to contribute have simply re-worked a pre-existing project - and this all too often includes (the usual) hacks and workarounds which all of us use when faced with deadlines. Bits and pieces of Flash4 ActionScript creep in every now and again - and occassionally the authors seem to be entirely unaware of new methods introduced in Flash5 that make their workarounds obsolete (the onClipEvent for loaded data is one example - see Chapt 9 of this book to learn how to do it the *old* way). Furthermore, the tutorials often lack focus - as though the editors can't decide where to pitch the level of instruction: so that some hard-core ActionScript is often mixed-in with superfluous detail about how to build the interface for the tutorial example. Anyway, my advice if you really want to *learn* ActionScript for yourself - and also avoid the mistakes, hacks and workarounds that plague the Friends of Ed books - put Phillip Kerman's excellent "ActionScripting in Flash" together with Colin Moock's "ActionScript: The Definitive Guide" on your desk - you'll never look back.
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