Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity (O'Reilly Digital Studio) [Paperback]

This book is a unique one on Flash 8 because it tears down the wall between artistic design books and technical manuals and succeeds at being both. It starts out simple by showing you how to draw elementary figures. It then moves on to customizing your properties and automating your workflow so that you can design quickly. Next, animation is presented along with all of the techniques you will need to be efficient plus how to perform various effects. This book is particularly good at showing the reader how to import sound, graphics, and video, and how to use scripting via AppleScript to control it all. The lessons are done via unique and creative projects. By the end of the book you won't be an expert on Flash, design techniques, or AppleScript, but you will be pretty good at putting the 3 together to perform interesting tasks in Flash and doing so efficiently. A good companion book to this one is "Flash 8: The Missing Manual". It explains all of the technical nuts and bolts of Flash that there is not room to accommodate in this book. I notice that Amazon does not show the table of contents, so I do that next:
1. Getting Started, Right Out of the Box
Drawing Your First Box 1
Coloring Fills and Strokes 7
Merging and Stacking Shapes 16
Creating Reusable Graphics 22
2. Creating Quickly: Customizing Your Workspace
Designing Your Own Panel Layout 27
Customizing Movie Properties 32
Aligning Objects on the Stage 33
Behind Every Good Symbol Is a Good Editor 37
Automate Your Workflow 39
3. Your First Animation 45
Layers and the Timeline 46
Keyframes and Tweening 50
Preparing Text for Animation 52
Staggering Animation 57
Alpha Effect 58
Motion Effects 58
Your First Script 63
Publishing Your Movie 65
4. Buttons and Interactivity
Buttons as Symbols 69
Scripting Your Button 73
Components and Behaviors 79
Navigation 83
More Fun with Buttons 90
vi Contents
5. Working with Graphics
Importing Pixels 95
Working with Pixels 101
Importing Vectors 106
Using Scenes 109
Working with the Library 110
6. Movie Clips and Interactivity
Drawing a Cartoon Character 115
Controlling the Character with ActionScript 128
More Movie Clip Control 131
7. More Animation Techniques
Morphing with Shape Tweens 135
Frame-by-Frame Animation 139
Using Masks 143
Timeline Versus ActionScript Animation 155
8. Using Sound
Importing Sounds 161
Controlling External Sounds 169
Scripting Your Own Sound Control 172
9. Using Video
Importing Video 181
Controlling External Videos 184
Scripting Your Own Video Control 190
10. Compositing and Bitmap Effects
Runtime Bitmap Caching 197
Bitmap Filter Effects 199
Blend Modes 210
11. Working with Text
Text Types 217
Using Fonts 221
Loading and Styling Text 223
FlashType 230
12. Loading Assets on the Fly
Using ActionScript to Modularize Content 235
Preloading 240
13. e-Learning with Flash
Creating a Quiz: Getting Started with Templates 249
Sending Results with a Form 254
Saving and Retrieving Local Data 260
14. Flash for CD-ROM and Handhelds
Flash on CD-ROM 271
Flash on the Run 277
vii Contents
15. Think Outside the Box
Exporting to Video 291
The Drawing API 299
Extending Flash 303
The Rest Is Up to You 311
A. Tips and Resources
Index

As the title states, this project-based approach to learning Flash 8 covers everything from becoming familiar with the interface to using both vector graphics versus pixilated images to the power of writing action script.

For the beginning Flash 8 user, this book starts from scratch on how to draw objects. It begins by having the reader draw a simple box; by then end of the third chapter, what started as one object has become a movie, complete with alpha effects, motion effects, and even a first stab at action script. The remainder of the book builds off these core aspects of Flash. As a beginner, the book made it easy to follow through the step-by-step processes required to make Flash 8 work as desired.

Not only does the book walk Flash users through the step-by-step processes, it also includes very useful sidebar notes and separate comment boxes (not to mention the wide sidebar space that just happen to be perfect for note-taking). These features are helpful in understanding how Flash `thinks' about the commands given in the projects. Also, the side notes will oftentimes refer the reader to the chapter in which a process is discussed in more detail to aid those more experienced users who have skipped around rather than reading the book cover-to-cover. Another handy feature of Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity is the appendix titled "Tips and Resources," which lists some optional websites to extend Flash 8s possibilities; there is also a list of sites to practice with more tutorials.

One potential downside of working through these projects comes with any book that uses the project-based approach: time. It takes time to work through the examples, even the ones that start out with some of the background work already done for you. However, this approach also gives a more thorough understanding of Flash 8 and should be beneficial to anyone who prefers a hands-on approach to learning the software. As such, it may be best suited for beginning users, but definitely has some information throughout that all semi-experienced Flash users should know.

The Flash 8 projects for learning Animation and Interactivity book is a good resource for beginner to learn animation. It takes you step by step using practice examples to teach you basic animation techniques. The title of the book show two issues the first one is learning animation and I think the writer covered this part very well for beginners. The second issue is Learning Interactivity, which is covered along with the animation. The chapter that causes confusion for me is the 13th chapter. As it talks about e-learning in Flash, which is a very big issue that can not covered in one chapter, even for beginners. I think this part needs another book to cover deeply and give the beginner a strong beginning step in the field of e-learning.

Regardless the 13th chapter I see the book focused well and this helps the beginners to grasp the idea of the animation in Flash.