Flash CS4 Professional Advanced for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickPro Guide (Visual QuickPro Guides) [Paperback]

This is another 4.5 star review - the Visual QuickPro Guides are a great series but I just cannot give technical book 5 stars. I also own Flash CS4 Professional for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide by Katherine Ulrich.

Well written book - great visual design - quick for picking up the basics of Actionscript. If I could do it over again, I would start with this book to learn Actionscript. I know some rudimentary Java -- so Actionscript was familiar.

I don't read books cover to cover, especially technical books. I might have with this one (and might still) but didn't have time as I had a project to get done. I dipped in and out to get the key things that I thought I needed.

This book focuses on Frame Scripts for the most part, not creating Actionscript Classes -- I would look at Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential) or ActionScript 3.0 Bible if you need that. The most difficult thing I grappled with is understanding that some of the keywords for Frame Scripts are different than some of the keywords for Class based scripts. Got that now!

What I like about this book is that is focuses on the stuff that you are most likely to do with Flash. So I could get what I needed, try to apply it, and go back and forth. Without this book I would have never finished my project. It gave a great entry point into Actionscript and I fully intend to read it from cover to cover.

I've tried other books that make things move, such as ActionScript 3.0 Game Programming University -- but unlike those other books, Russel Chun's guide makes you understand what you are doing.

Again, great tip sections and further explanation guides. I'm still struggling with understanding some concepts -- but now I feel confident that I can -- there are very few books that make you feel that way.

Start here and Make Things Move! (and understand what you are doing!)

I worked as a graphic designer professionally for awhile, and still do some graphics free lance work now and then, and I've struggled to understand Action Script for years.

I never took programming or scripting courses. I had to learn Flash and Action Script for an old job years ago, and I had to learn it on my own by reading books and online tutorials.

In the past, I've read a mountain of books on AS2 (Action Script 2) and so far only about three or four on AS3 (Action Script 3).

Out of the Action Script books I've read so far (for A.S. versions two and three), this book by Chun is one of the best.

I own several books about AS3, but have only read a few of them at this time.

As for version 3 alone, the one by Mr. Chun is *the* best one yet.

The other AS3 Quick Start Guide wasn't bad, either (it was entitled 'ActionScript 3.0: Visual QuickStart Guide,' by Derrick Ypenburg).

I've already read the first edition of 'Learning ActionScript 3.0: A Beginner's Guide' by Shupe and Rosser, but despite its title, that book is most certainly not for beginners; it was too complex and mainly seemed to focus on esoteric, not common tasks, one would do in Flash. (I wrote a review of the Shupe and Rosser book on Amazon.)

Another poor choice for beginner Action Scripters:

The "Action Script 3 for Adobe CS4 Professional Classroom in A Book" (and the CS5 version is quite similar to the CS4 one, both are published by Adobe Systems Inc.) offered lots of tutorials and exercises, but little in the way of explanation for how and why the scripts work, so I had to put that book aside temporarily so I could read this one by Chun.

This book by Chun covers most of the ordinary things you're likely to use Action Script 3 for, and out of all the AS3 books I've seen so far, it does the best job of clearly explaining what the code is doing and how it works and why.

I also like the fact that after Chun shows the reader a script, he often explains other uses for it - how you might use the script in another project and why.

I can't begin to tell you the number of times I've read A.S. books where an author shows a chunk of script, and all I can think of is,

'When would I ever want to use this concept or script? What is it good for?,'

but in some sections of the book, Chun explains multiple uses for some of the scripts he contains in the book, something which helped me understand the scripts better.

There were one or two small areas in the book that were unclear to me that I wished the author had explained differently or in more depth, but the vast majority of the book was very clear, and it demystified a lot of Action Script for me.

(As for the unclear parts: I did not fully understand the last couple of lines of script on page 465, in figure 11.37. There were one or two other brief areas later in the book that I didn't totally understand.)

Thankfully - yes *thankfully!* - in the chapters that discussed math, atans, cosine, radians, etc., the author kept the explanations short and simple.

Mr. Chun just gets right to what you're trying to accomplish in Flash with Action Script in the math chapters (and in other chapters covering other topics, too) and explains it in a straight forward manner, with straight forward examples - which is how I prefer to learn especially when math crops up in to the discussion.

In most other AS3 (or even in AS version 2) books I've read, the authors, for some reason I cannot figure out, "over-explain" these mathematical, trig, and geometry concepts.

What I mean is that some of the A.S. authors spend half to three-fourths of a chapter giving the reader a detailed history behind mathematics and the philosophy behind animation and movement, which only confuses me more!

(I was never any good at math anyway, nor did I ever take trig or geometry - just tell me how to get the dang movie clip to move in a circular fashion or whatever instead of spending pages on the boring theories behind math formulas, how to calculate the sides of triangles, how to calculate angles, or whatever. Or at least keep such discussions short and sweet.)

This author doesn't muddle things up and confuse the reader by tossing too much mathematical jargon or theory at them. He does explain the concepts behind the math a bit, but he gets to the point about it.

I am also very grateful that the author sticks to timeline based scripts only (this book will NOT teach you how to make classes and packages, which to me, is a huge bonus, not a detriment).

I have another AS3 book for beginners I began reading a few months ago (the title escapes me at the moment) where the author of this other book has the reader jump straight into using classes and packages in the first few chapters, and I find that approach totally confusing (so I had to put his book aside temporarily).

I much prefer Mr. Chun's approach in this book of teaching script that goes in the timeline only.

I think beginners to intermediate level learners are already confused enough by plain old time line Action Script 3 without forcing them to have to jump an additional hurdle of learning external scripting stuff (OOP, classes, packages).

I think the publisher really ought to market this book as more than just a generic Flash book.

This book does such an outstanding job explaining AS3, I think in future editions of the book, they should rename it to give it some kind of sub heading on the cover indicating it can help beginners or intermediate level types learn Action Script 3.

As it stands now, unless I had used Amazon's "search inside this book" feature on this book, I would have thought, just based on the cover only, that it's one of those basic introductory Flash books that only discusses the usual stuff, (such as how to use the paint bucket tool), and so I would've missed out on a great Action Script book.

If you are a beginner who finds Action Script totally confusing, I'm not saying this book and this one alone will do the trick. You may still need to supplement it with a few free online tutorials, or one or two other books.

However, take it from someone who has been intimidated by Action Script for years, and who has read many books about Action Script: this is one of the best books out there on the subject for anyone beginner to intermediate.

This is a good guide book for those who are ready to move into intermediate/expert level Flash skills. Its very brief, dry and straight forward. It isn't meant to be read as a fun way to learn. It's just one of those quick guide books for picking up skills in hurry. There's nothing fancy about it. It will probably be handy to have around for future reference I'm sure. Its a relatively thin book considering everything it covers. Its size is less intimidating than other books on this subject which makes it read a little easier and quicker. You'll be doing advanced design and programming right away with this whether you understand what you're doing or not. The Actionscript aspect of it feels a little too brief coming from someone without previous programming experience, but this did not surprise me. It introduces many basic programming functions a person needs to know but doesn't always go into depth on how it works or why. If understanding Actionscript 3.0 in depth is what you're after, I'd consider ActionScript 3.0: Visual QuickStart Guide. Stick with this with this book if you want to get a good, broad understanding of the general intermediate/expert aspects of Flash quickly and efficiently. For what it is, I think it's written better than most. It gets the job done but its not much fun.