Good medium level book

My overall opinion of this book is that it is good. It covers a lot of ground and for those of you with some experience in Flash you will find this book will help you do more with the new version of Flash.
The layout of this book was in my opinion done very well; there are three main sections and the ActionScript reference is not one of them nor does it take up half the book. The first section is the "Getting Started" piece which goes over the basics which you may already be familiar. This section does go into some detail about what is new in Flash 8 and how to take advantage of these new features. One item I liked was learning about drawn lines and how I can tweak the end points or the corners in my drawn boxes/rectangles. Also there was the tween editor for manipulating how I wanted an object to tween. Great stuff since I am more of the coder than the designer.
The second part of the book is more familiar to me, it is on ActionScript. This material covers many of the classes and how to work with particular data types like Arrays and Strings. Also there is some Object Orientated Programming (OOP) information, just enough to whet an appetite but not that much to frustrate you to no end. There are plenty of books out there which focus on ActionScripting too much higher levels this book does a good job of getting you to a higher level without the heartache.
The last part of the book really hits on the current use of Flash as a dynamic medium, talking through middleware to a server or database. This is an extremely useful skill as a developer, the more you can do with Flash to communicate outside of the Flash player the better off you are. You will find material on ASP, PHP and even a chapter on Remoting. You will not find examples here that are too extreme but it will cover the basics so you can take what you glean from the text and do more on your own. One chapter I was pleased to see was one on functions, events and debugging. These three items are important to know how to use well for creating top notch Flash media. I was even surprised to see material on integrating JSFL into your development process, very welcome material.
I came to this book looking for information on the new version of Flash and to see what else I can do with it as a developer. Most everything I was looking for was here and the items I wanted to find and did not probably were too advanced for the book anyway. (No material on using Scale 9 and the material on uploading files was quite skimpy.) What I did get out of the book was enough to keep me busy for a while. If you have time over the holiday break this would be a good book to blow through so you can begin the New Year with some new skills and knowledge.

Other Reviews

• Review for the Alaska and Military Members Apple User Group
• Unless you're a hardcore programmer, don't buy this one.
• Proofreading unleashed
• Good medium level book