I wish I could give a ratring of 0 or negative stars.
I spent the whole morning trying to follow the examples in the early chapters and nothing worked. I went over the code it told me to enter line by line and had someone else proof it in case I missed something. Still, nothing worked. After awhile I started noticing things being mentioned that were no longer in 2004. They ask you at one point to go to Insert>Convert to Symbol. That's no longer there in 2004. Same for Windows>Actions. Also gone in 2004. That was my first clue that this was not written for ActionScript 2.0 or MX 2004, but an earlier version and has been mistitled. How this book got published is a mystery to me.
I've worked my way through lots of tutorial books and this book is a total ripoff and is in no way meant to teach beginners ActionScript 2.0. It should be taken off the shelf until they retitle it as written for MX and not 2004.
To reiterate: If you're trying to learn Flash MX 2004's ActionScript 2.0, this book has been mistitled and you will never learn it from this book.