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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent business reference
Review: Breaking the mold of the how-to and step-by-step approach this book looks at the business side of building a succesful Flash project. It's refreshing to hear why decisions were made, because of budget limitations, difficult clients or looming deadlines. This book is an excellent read, is well written and offers a realistic look at the many challenges Flash developers face besides the technology. An excellent addition to my library!
Rating: 
Summary: Missing Source Code :(
Review: This is a Flash book that focuses on specific projects the author has been involved in. There are only six such projects covered. They include,
- a product demo
- an interactive holiday card
- two web sites done in Flash
- LEGO game
- Furniture.com's Room PlannerEven though the book promises source code on the CD, the Room Planner project relies heavily on ASP/database backend and they DO NOT include this code. The result is that the Flash source included for Room Planner will not work. When someone from our firm asked the author about this he replied that his former employer owns that code and would not allow it to be published. You can still learn from the Flash source code but its value is a whole lot less because you cannot see the application working. And, given that Furniture.com is now out of business you cannot see the application in action there either! Our main reason for this review is to simply alert others BEFORE they buy this book about the missing source code. If this is not an issue for you this book may benefit you. In our case, we purchased the book to learn from the Room Planner source code so the book has little value to us.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent book, with a few caveats...
Review: This is an excellent idea for a Flash book. There are a glut of boring, color-by-numbers step-by-step tutorial books out there that teach you the "How's" of Flash, but almost none of them spend any time discussing the "Why's" of Flash project development. Knowing how to use Flash is one thing, but using it in a *professional* context, with real-world clients who sometimes make crazy demands on you, is quite another. "Flash for The Real World" is a very enlightening look into what goes on behind the scenes during the project development process with real clients. I've always believed that any professional media project should consist of 20% actual production work, and 80% pre-production work. This book certainly bolsters that opinion. It makes clear that before you even fire up Flash, you must play the parts of an interviewer, marketing executive, ad agency, manager, art director and accountant all at once. A difficult, but necessary job. I did find a few problems with the book, however. First off, most of the examples are projects which were done in the heyday of dot-com venture capital dementia, when companies irrationally solved short term goals by simply throwing copious amounts of money at them. The chapters relating to Furniture.com, in particular, seem rather anachronistic now (especially since that company went Chapter 11), because the solutions Mr. Street provided for them back then--most notably, a dynamic furniture "room planner" that had to be delivered to the client in a ridiculous three weeks!--could not be realistically done in the same manner today, due to belt-tightening at most dot-com companies. This is not to imply that creative development is somehow fundamentally different because of the dot-com crash, but the reader should keep things in perspective and understand that you just can't develop something as complicated as the Furniture.com RoomPlanner from concept to completion in 3 measly weeks unless you are getting paid mega-bucks to do so and have the support crew to back you up. The other problem I have with the book is that some of the project examples just aren't very good applications of Flash technology. The chapter on the DesignMentor.com site, in particular, is a prime example of "use of technology for technology's sake". While the overall graphic design is very nice, the Flash presentation adds absolutely nothing to the "experience" and usability of the site. If anything, it seriously detracts from it. The Flash-based scrolling text windows are very sluggish and clunky, even on fast computers. Also, the user-interface design is poor and very non-intuitive--having the main navigation in the lower right corner and the sub-navigation appearing on the exact opposite side of the screen is very confusing, not to mention that it's far too much mouse movement for such little payoff. The text in the button rollovers should also be tinted a darker color than white, since it gets totally lost in the gray "highlight" when you roll over them. While the author readily admits that the site probably could have been done in HTML just as effectively, it sounds as if he was still trying to find any justification to make it an all-Flash site. The justification he found in the fact that Tiffany & Co.'s commerce site was done entirely in Flash seems extremely tenuous, especially when you view the final results of the DesignMentor Flash site. I would have hoped that one of the "Real World" issues covered in this book would be how to recognize when NOT to use Flash. As developers, our goal should be to make the end user's experience easy and fulfilling, and NOT to jerk ourselves off with technology that may impress us and our clients, but means absolutely nothing to the end user. Granted, this is a book about Flash, and not user-interface design, but I don't think that a book on "Real World" Flash development should just gloss over such an important element. While the book doesn't have to teach basic UI design theory, it should at least *practice* it, since good UI design is absolutely critical to any interactive project. You can add all the "cool" animated gimmicks you want, but if the user has to think too much to use your interface, then you're one step away from losing them as a satisfied user. Nothing could prove this fact better than the example of the author's very own website, Hookumu.com (included on the CD-ROM, in the "Projects/Client Work" section). His use of the horizontal scrollbar to reveal the text description for the currently selected project is an absolute user-interface nightmare! It's offers the same quality of "experience" as reading a long e-mail message via a single-line LCD on your digital pager. It seems that this interface convention exists as an afterthought to the overall graphic design, and in this case, aesthetics won out over functionality. This is very unfortunate. Another little nitpicky thing that I am legally obligated to point out is that Mr. Street completly mangles the phonetic pronounciation of his own company, Hookumu.com, on the CD-ROM example. The proper pronounciation is "Ho-oh-koo-moo", and NOT "who-kah-moo", which unfortunately means something entirely different in the Hawaiian language. All that being said, I still heartily recommend this book. There's really not any other book like it that I'm aware of, and even with its flaws, it's extremely informative and educational for anyone wanting to offer Flash development services on a professional level.
Rating:
Summary: Missing Source Code :(
Review: This is an excellent idea for a Flash book. There are a glut of boring, color-by-numbers step-by-step tutorial books out there that teach you the "How's" of Flash, but almost none of them spend any time discussing the "Why's" of Flash project development. Knowing how to use Flash is one thing, but using it in a *professional* context, with real-world clients who sometimes make crazy demands on you, is quite another. "Flash for The Real World" is a very enlightening look into what goes on behind the scenes during the project development process with real clients. I've always believed that any professional media project should consist of 20% actual production work, and 80% pre-production work. This book certainly bolsters that opinion. It makes clear that before you even fire up Flash, you must play the parts of an interviewer, marketing executive, ad agency, manager, art director and accountant all at once. A difficult, but necessary job. I did find a few problems with the book, however. First off, most of the examples are projects which were done in the heyday of dot-com venture capital dementia, when companies irrationally solved short term goals by simply throwing copious amounts of money at them. The chapters relating to Furniture.com, in particular, seem rather anachronistic now (especially since that company went Chapter 11), because the solutions Mr. Street provided for them back then--most notably, a dynamic furniture "room planner" that had to be delivered to the client in a ridiculous three weeks!--could not be realistically done in the same manner today, due to belt-tightening at most dot-com companies. This is not to imply that creative development is somehow fundamentally different because of the dot-com crash, but the reader should keep things in perspective and understand that you just can't develop something as complicated as the Furniture.com RoomPlanner from concept to completion in 3 measly weeks unless you are getting paid mega-bucks to do so and have the support crew to back you up. The other problem I have with the book is that some of the project examples just aren't very good applications of Flash technology. The chapter on the DesignMentor.com site, in particular, is a prime example of "use of technology for technology's sake". While the overall graphic design is very nice, the Flash presentation adds absolutely nothing to the "experience" and usability of the site. If anything, it seriously detracts from it. The Flash-based scrolling text windows are very sluggish and clunky, even on fast computers. Also, the user-interface design is poor and very non-intuitive--having the main navigation in the lower right corner and the sub-navigation appearing on the exact opposite side of the screen is very confusing, not to mention that it's far too much mouse movement for such little payoff. The text in the button rollovers should also be tinted a darker color than white, since it gets totally lost in the gray "highlight" when you roll over them. While the author readily admits that the site probably could have been done in HTML just as effectively, it sounds as if he was still trying to find any justification to make it an all-Flash site. The justification he found in the fact that Tiffany & Co.'s commerce site was done entirely in Flash seems extremely tenuous, especially when you view the final results of the DesignMentor Flash site. I would have hoped that one of the "Real World" issues covered in this book would be how to recognize when NOT to use Flash. As developers, our goal should be to make the end user's experience easy and fulfilling, and NOT to jerk ourselves off with technology that may impress us and our clients, but means absolutely nothing to the end user. Granted, this is a book about Flash, and not user-interface design, but I don't think that a book on "Real World" Flash development should just gloss over such an important element. While the book doesn't have to teach basic UI design theory, it should at least *practice* it, since good UI design is absolutely critical to any interactive project. You can add all the "cool" animated gimmicks you want, but if the user has to think too much to use your interface, then you're one step away from losing them as a satisfied user. Nothing could prove this fact better than the example of the author's very own website, Hookumu.com (included on the CD-ROM, in the "Projects/Client Work" section). His use of the horizontal scrollbar to reveal the text description for the currently selected project is an absolute user-interface nightmare! It's offers the same quality of "experience" as reading a long e-mail message via a single-line LCD on your digital pager. It seems that this interface convention exists as an afterthought to the overall graphic design, and in this case, aesthetics won out over functionality. This is very unfortunate. Another little nitpicky thing that I am legally obligated to point out is that Mr. Street completly mangles the phonetic pronounciation of his own company, Hookumu.com, on the CD-ROM example. The proper pronounciation is "Ho-oh-koo-moo", and NOT "who-kah-moo", which unfortunately means something entirely different in the Hawaiian language. All that being said, I still heartily recommend this book. There's really not any other book like it that I'm aware of, and even with its flaws, it's extremely informative and educational for anyone wanting to offer Flash development services on a professional level.
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