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Flash Site Workshop

TITLE: Flash Site Workshop PUBLISHER: Sams ISBN: 0-672-31999-3 PAGES: 384 colour CD: Yes AUTHORS: Ken Milburn, Craig Swann, Lynn Baus, Lon Coley, Cyndy Cashman Get it now from Amazon.com

If you're one of those people who enjoy taking stuff apart to see how it works, then this is the book for you.

The premise is this:
The CD is filled with generic modular royalty free Flash widgets that can be taken apart, re-skinned and otherwise customised to suit your needs. There's enough widgets, bits, gizmos and doo-hickeys here to build yourself just about any kind of dynamic Flash site.

Ken Milburn and his team have assembled a smorgasbord of Flash thingamajigs and wotsits that really take the pain out of building dynamic Flash sites. All the usual toys are here, tickers, newsfeeds, even e-commerce stuff and a multi-threaded message board.

These days clients, in their eternal quest for 'stickiness', are demanding more and more dynamic sites. This package (I hesitate to call it just a book) allows smaller design shops to compete with the big boys. There is enough here to quickly assemble a functional engine thus allowing the less technical designer to get on and design. It's a pretty unique idea and I'm amazed nobody's thought to do it before.

Personally I'm a bit distrusting of 'black boxes' and given the time I'd prefer to build everything myself however in this industry it's not often we have the luxury of time. Where this package really comes into it's own is rapid prototyping. You can literally put a site together in a matter of hours.

Although this modular approach is very simple it is not the sort of thing you'd want to be undertaking having just picked up Flash for the first time. You need at least a basic understanding of Actionscript before you wade in. It will be most suited to designers who know the functionality they want to achieve but are not yet able to code it for themselves, or to small design shops who are tight on budget and deadlines.

The tutorials carefully document each widget and shows you how to customize them for your own use. In addition to Flash and Actionscript the book covers technologies such as Quicktime, XML, SQL and ASP. The Actionscript though functional is an odd mix of version 4 and version 5 syntax.

My only real grumble is that you have no choice for the back-end solution. If you want to make full use of this package then you are looking at a Windows back-end, more specifically yout looking at Windows NT/2000 and IIS4.0+.

Most hosting companies charge a premium for Windows hosting so unless you're big enough to host yourself you'll have to swallow that extra cost. But this is aimed at small business developers and as the saying goes, "no one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft" (sadly).

The Windows back end means your scripts and database functionality are served by ASP and MySQL respectively. Both of which are not as hard to get your head round as you might think. You will need to install MySQL on your development machine in order to work with the files and the writers have thoughtfully provided a tutorial to help you configure it.

All in all, a great idea, well implemented. Just a shame it ties you to Windows.