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Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity (O'Reilly Digital Studio) Review by Linda Weller
This is great for the beginner
Flash 8 Projects for learning Animation and Interactivity
By Rich Shupe & Robert Hoekman, Jr.
Publisher: O'Reilly
Copyright 2006
IBSN: 0-596-10223-2
Review by: Linda Weller
The books learning style is organic. They pair topics with goals. You learn by doing. Shortcuts are highlighted. Self teaching is encouraged by allowing you to expand on the projects using what you have learned. Sample files are available online or on the CD Rom.
They try to spoon feed you a little ActionScript in the sidebars of the book. Then you get to the chapter on creating a form and wow your using somewhat complex ActionScript and a PHP form. I hope you have a server installed that allows PHP for this one.
This book is filled with lots of special little tips. For example they tell you the difference between object level undo's and document level undo's. I bet you thought it was just ctrl +z.
Some of the Flash 8 features that are covered are Object drawing and Merge draw and when to you each one, metadata fields to make your Flash files search engine friendly, copy to grid assistant and, the distributed duplicate assistant.
Productivity tips are covered using the align panel, timeline effect assistants and the history panel. Have you ever needed to change a symbol's registration point after it is made? Go to the Info window.
Usability is covered. The author's show you how to add an active content bar to your menu buttons so the user knows where they are in the menu. Also, using the anchor from the label type drop down menu which is like an HTML anchor enables the back and forward buttons to work when navigating browsers.
There is information on all the basics: making an invisible button, tweening, shape tweening and, masks. How to work with assets is discussed. They show why we use PNG format in Flash with a rather graphic example. You can access round trip editing with a program of your choice.
Chapter 7 is loaded with lots of animation techniques such as using shape tweening to have a house draw itself, gradient masks, enabling bitmap caching with ActionScript on the mask and masked movie clips. There is a whole exercise to help you learn to decide when you would use scripted and when you would use timeline animation.
The chapter on sound give you some great tips on trimming unused portions of your sound and using short loops to optimize your files. They even tell you of a free sound editor. You create an MP3 player and a video player with ActionScript as well as creating players using the components.
All the new Bitmap caching and filter effects are discussed. You make bevel filters using ActionScript 2.0 classes.
They close off the last chapter with lots of web resources and tips. For example for file optimization purposes you can go to "file--save-- compact new" this totally removes deleted files from the system and reduces file size.