A cut above the rest! This review is a couple of years late, but I just recently re-compared the book to others I have more recently purchased. I don't know if the stars were just aligned correctly or what when this book came together, but I liked it for its content - high quality and relatively succinct. Mohler seems to know quite a bit about the subjects in the book, and convinced me that he is passionate about discussing them. The book is much better than the regurgitation ad blah blah in the second edition.
Don't judge this book by its cover Don't judge this book by its cover, even do it's one of the worst in its kind. I read many Flash books trying to learn more about ActionScripting not just how to edit a color or adding links. For that purpose it became an excellent source of information, with guided examples for the non-expert but neither dummyThis book was a terrible dissappointment! The author includes hundreds of lame work along type exercises which don't explain how flash works. Also, many very important topics are not fully covered such as how to execute a movie from a button. And some of the examples like how to create a drop down menu don't even work! Every time I was trying to implement a new component of flash, I ended up searching the internet flash resourse directories for the answers because the book just didn't contain any! I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.this book was terrible I tend to think that the people who have been writing great reviews about this book are friends of the author or maybe the author himself. This is the worst book on Flash I have ever read. The examples are horrible - it seems as though the author does not have much experience himself with Flash so he could not include many good examples. If you want to purchase a great book on Flash get 'Flash 4 Creative Web Animation' or the 'Flash 4 Bible', both excelent books.
Steve
Good but not great I found this book to be "good but not great". It is a useful "second step" to further understanding Flash 4 after you have read Ulrich's "Flash for Windows and Macintosh" in the Visual Quick Start Guide series. However, on a number of instances the tutorial files wouldn't open (I have a PC)and on occasion it seemed that the step by step exercises would miss a crucial piece of information to allow one to follow along accurately. Also, on some occasions the author wouldn't tell you how to do a certain step he instructs you to do and often there is given no commentary as to why you are doing something in the exercise. You are often just instructed to do certain steps without knowing why. Again, overall this is a good book, but it seems that the author may have gotton most of his feedback from those who were already more advanced students of graphics and animation and could pick up better the gray areas in book where he is not clear.
