The Essential Guide to Open Source Flash Development [Paperback]

This book has what its title says.

The first 6 chapters by Marc Hughes give you an elaborate overview of how to setup all the open-source applications for an efficient Flash workflow in both Actionscript2 and Actionscript3. This is key, as trying to find out what and why and where and how to use these apps can be very time-consuming. For the seasoned Flash developer, who's already familiar with FlashDevelop, Ant, Eclipse,.. this might be largely known territory, although there might still be a lot useful tips and tweaks to find.

Chapter 7 deals with using AMFPHP and is written by AMFPHP's Wade Arnold. It is a very good introduction to AMFPHP and goes into enough depth to cover a lot. I was very happy to read through this.
Chapter 8, 9 and 10 deal with SWX, HaXe and FUSE/GOASAP and i found them equally inspiring.
Chapter 11 by Andy Zupko tells about Papervision3D, but it is very brief and although a good start, there's tons more to find on Zupko's blog and many more excellent tutorials through Google. So if you want to buy this book for getting into Papervision3D, you're set for disappointment.
Chapter 12 and 13 are an excellent read on the Red5 server, even with some wild MIDI implementation. Great stuff.

So why not 5 stars? For a book of this scope, covering a lot of different frameworks or even languages, it should have been 600 pages. The first 6 chapters are excellent and deliver on the title's promise. The rest is largely introductory material with a varying usefulness. Also will some material be in AS2, other in AS3.

I'm happy with it, but at the same time i'm left with an unsatisfied after-seminar feeling.

This book succinctly introduces a range of open source tools and applications that can be used in the development of rich Flash content. The nature of the content make this volume unsuitable for all but experienced developers of Flash and the reader will require a good understanding of development environments to really get the most out of this volume. That said this is a useful text and introduces a range of powerful tools and libraries in a clear and friendly manner. The numerous authors of the text are all professionals in the field of Flash development and many are leaders in their fields of expertise.

The book is divided into 13 chapters with the first six chapters, (chapters two to six by Marc Hughes) being devoted to introducing the reader to the open source Flash development, the work environments, work flow, testing and debugging and deploying developed applications. This approach works well and introduces the reader gradually the necessary components and stages required to work with the tools and libraries. The reader is taken through the necessary steps to enable them to engage with and benefit from the content of the latter half of the book. This first half is well written and is the more useful and substantive element of the book. It is here that the real value of a text such as this lies.

The remaining half of the book is given over to the actual tools and libraries. The authors of the chapters have provided concise and useful guides on a range of applications and libraries. These include the Flash-to-PHP gateway AMFPHP, the data format SWX, the programming language haXe, the open source libraries for coding animation Fuse and GoASAP, the 3d library Papervision3D and the open source server developed specifically for Flash RED5.

Each of these topics is introduced and discussed briefly before a more in depth examination of how it can be used and the advantages and disadvantages of its deployment. One particular useful aspect of these discussions is the illustrations that are used to explain how the various components fit together. While these chapters are useful they are, for my liking, a little too brief and far more could have been said on many of the topics. Indeed the book could easily have been twice the not insubstantial 382 pages.

This is the only real criticism I have of what is a good text that does exactly what it says it will. Overall this is a useful guide to the subject of open source applications and libraries for Flash. The tone of the prose is friendly, informative and not overwhelming. The page layout, visual style, structure and general feel of the book is high quality. The book is a good example of a well written and useful guide to a topic. It may only serve as an introduction to the various areas covered and far more could have been included, but this is certainly a useful contribution to the field and certainly worth investigating if Flash is your area of interest.