Flash 5 ActionScript Studio [With CDROM]

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.

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 materialin my view, andthere seems a ton of useful stuff in here.Good, but Challenging. IMHO

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!

This book is, along with Moock's Actionscript book for O'Reilly, the first really solid book covering programming in Flash 5. That includes good stuff on planning projects, code structuring, OOP, design, and XML much more in depth than any other Flash book I've seen. It is definately advanced, perhaps not to the point of some of the hardcore OOP coders on the Flash lists, but quite complex and more than enough to challenge most readers, which is good. The projects are good and varied, and it seems like Friends of Ed has at last gotten someone to insure that coding styles are reasonably consistant throughout the book--other of their Flash books have been essentially collections of inconsistant and often incompatible articles. The usual suspects do show up (spaceship games and rotating 3D cubes), but presented with a level of detail and thoroughness totally absent in other books (short tutorial in matrix math anyone?) The great chapters on Sound and XML are almost worth the price alone, but the standout chapter is called "Creativity in Practice" and covers invaluable stuff like: working in teams, interaction planning, prototyping, information architecture, even some usability. In other words, the stuff that professional designers do the 80% of the time they're not messing around with software. It's exciting to see these topics appear in what could have been just another coding book.I won't dock it a star, but one qualm is that it doesn't come with a CD (again contrary to Kevin's review below). You have to download about 80Megs of files from the publishers site. Come on guys, if there's no CD at least knock a few bucks off the price. And even at high-speeds, that 80Meg download is kind of a pain.

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!