You don't really need an advanced knowledge of Flash to use this book. How to cheat in flash is very, very good. It is targetted mostly at cartoon animators rather than users that will want to do Action Scripting, presentation or web development. This book will guide you through from start to finish for a lot of basic animation techniques and provides a good insight into how to implement your own ideas. it also gives instruction on how to perform commands etc on both the Windows and Mac. Again, I would only recommend this book if you are into cartoon animation mainly, otherwise there are probably better books out there.