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Flash 8: The Missing Manual Review by southpawami
You'll probably learn something useful
This is my first Missing Manual book that I've read through. I'm sure that humor is something difficult to perform in a step by step text. Still, as the text droned on and on with too limited a vocabulary, I found myself fighting harder to make it through this book.
The lady author did make a joke here and there, in fact I think about every 70 pages there was a joke or two until later in the book. Somewhere in the 300s, the lady changed her vocabulary from simple explanations to simple explanations with some American slang in between. The sentence with 'muff' was my personal favorite in the book. That sentence flowed so natural, I felt as if she was talking to me in a conversation. After that, it went somewhat downhill with slang she didn't seem well adapted to, and later getting better toward the end of the book. Other than lack of vocabulary, she took nearly a hundred solid pages and used 'she' instead of 'he' in her sentences. English wise, she 'muffed' up. A better choice would have been 'individual' or 'person' or if she so desired 'dude' or 'dudette'. In that case, the slang would have been obvious, and loose rules would be applied.
As far as teaching, the book does provide the necessary information to use Flash to produce an animation, basic web page, or an animated GIF. There are a few notable shortcuts given, such as #Static, which were worth the last hundred pages you made it through to read them. Actionscript is very lightly covered. It seemed that she was tired of this book somewhere in the middle of the 300s, which is understandable, as I was tired of the book at least thirty pages before it was obvious the author was. Covering Publishing, Publishing Profiles, and Exporting was well done excluding her PICT explanation where she didn't explain dpi(dots per inch) or postscript, which was definitely not any of the prior options of gif, jpg, or png which she compared the export PICT option menu to.
The book also makes many references to programming, but seems bound by the presentation and audience of the book to achieve that depth. This book would have been better if the times when the author found herself bored, she consulted a thesaurus to vary the vocabulary.
Even though I've spoken of some annoyances, the missing manual book does it's job. Flash 8 basics to intermediate usage was taught. The step by step instructions were simple and easy to understand. There is enough explaining to understand and learn what is going on. While the book does fail to achieve and maintain an 'interesting' status, the book succeeds in it's objective to be a simply understandable guide to Flash 8.