Home

Flash 5 Magic with Actionscript

Flash 5 Magic comes with quite a pedigree. The editors, J Scott Hamlin and David J Emberton have authored some of the best of the Flash 4 books including this books predecessor Flash 4 Magic. They are joined this time by four other contributors, Mathew David, Jennifer S Hall, John Lenker and Samuel Wan.

TITLE: Flash 5 Magic - with Actionscript
PUBLISHER: New Riders
ISBN: 0-7357-1023-6
PAGES: 375 colour
AUTHORS: J Scott Hamlin, David J Emberton, Mathew David, Jennifer S Hall, John Lenker, Samuel Wan
Get it now from Amazon

Firstly, this is a coding book.

A quick glance through the contents offers up such tantalising gems as 'Utilizing XML data', 'Working with Form Elements and ASP' and 'Implementing complex database integration' (I shit you not). This is hardcore - definitely not for the newbie.

Flash straddles that peculiar designer/ programmer grey area and as such has had a curious side effect when it comes to books. Publishers have to appeal to both designers as well as programmers and the end result is tech manuals that look great! This is very much a coding book but New Riders have made the requisite concessions towards design and produced a book that is richly illustrated and in full colour.

The code examples really bring it home to you just how much of a paradigm shift there is between the old and the new actionscript. If you've stumbled into programming from a design background you'll find shorthand coding tricks (such as double pipe and modulo for example) an absolute revelation. It teaches you to let go of deprecated F4 syntax and write smaller, more elegant code.

While I'm on the subject and just to confuse matters further, the current buzz on the Flash boards is a return to using deprecated Flash 4 code because it actually runs faster through the plugin. That said I reckon it's extremely useful to be able to jump back and forwards between both. In essence, you need to understand the rules before you break them.

When six authors contribute to a book you are bound to get differences in prose style and coding but I really can't forgive Jennifer Halls rampant use of deprecated code. All the other authors make great use of the new syntax but her code seems littered with Call statements, Set Property's, and a 52 value array assigned one value at a time! Maybe I missed the point but the techie in me was crying out "optimise! optimise!"

Little grumbles aside this is an excellent book and I unreservedly recommend it to anyone who wants to take Flash 5 and push it to its limits.

Over the course of 375 pages there are excellent tutorials on every aspect of this latest release and the project based tutorials could easily form the basis of a new site should you wish.

All the source code is including on a CD that accompanies the book.