February 14th 2001 | Jarle Dahl Bergersen

Flash ActionScript f/x & Design

Author: Bill Sanders Publisher: Coriolis ISBN: 1-57610-821-X Pages: 303 b/w Buy it now from Amazon.com

When first seeing the cover of this book you might be led to belive that it is all about ActionScripting used for effects and design. It is not. If you set out to learn more about how to create visually stunning sites, then Flash ActionScript f/x & Design is not the book for you.

On the other hand, if you are allready fairly skilled in Flash, then this book will teach you what you need to know to take the next step into making really interactive and advanced Flash movies with the help of the ECMA based ActionScripting in Flash 5.

Bill Sanders is a professor at the University of Hartford, teaching at the schools Interactive Information Technology program. He has written many books on the subject of technology and programming. And it shines through in his writing, the explanations are throughout and well written.

Sanders offers exercises for every chapter of the book and a CD with FLAs for every single exercise comes with the book, so you can get your hands deep in Flash 5 ActionScript. The good examples together with the source code should get you understanding the fundamentals of ActionScripting and Object oriented programming in a Flash :-)

The attached CD comes with 30 day versions of Flash, Freehand, Dreamweaver and Fireworks, and a nice "How to Make a Font" Flash movie made by Leslie Cabarga.

Flash ActionScript f/x & Design covers a wide range of topics. Going through fundamentals of programming and covering topics like variables, data types, basic actions , conditionals and operators, loops, events, properties, functions, duplication of movie clips, using paths and calling functions.

Sanders starts out with the simple and builds on it through the book, and it should make it fairly easy for even novice programmers starting out with programming to follow the book and get a grip on the concepts of programming in general and ActionScript in particular.

But the more advanced new features of Flash 5 is not covered in the book. XML and XML Sockets are barely mentioned, and it seems to have been a glitch that the few lines ever made it into the book in the first place.

Another shortcoming of Flash ActionScript f/x & Design is that Sanders completely forgets to mention the implications of using some of the new features of Flash 5 and exporting as Flash 4 format. One example is using dot notation (new in Flash 5) versus path notation in targeting movie clips.

Sanders doesn't use a single line to talk about the problems when converting from Flash 4 to Flash 5 as a production tool and the pitfalls that are at hand for Flash developers making Flash 4 files in Flash 5. A small notice and some few words about it in the book would have been nice..

That said, Sanders does a good job explaining how some things used to work in Flash 4, how they now work in Flash 5, and why the ways of Flash 5 is better.

All in all this is a book for designers wanting to learn more about how to make more advanced and interactive Flash presentations. Don't expect this book to give you any new inspiration about the visual design of your Flash projects, but it will show you how to make magic with ActionScript and give you the basics of what you need to make that new cutting-edge-mega-presentation get extra momentum and interactivity.

If you are a designer, or even a programmer, wanting to learn more about ActionScripting, then this is the book for you. This is a book to read close to your computer. Chances are high that you will feel like getting your hands dirty with some of the exercises right away, or that you will get started making the stuff you have always wanted to make but never knew how to, while reading the book.

An extra bonus is the Example Glossary at the back of the book with thorough explanations of actions, operators, functions and properties in Flash 5.