Foundation Macromedia Flash MX 2004

Foundation Macromedia Flash MX 2004 is a book meant to introduce beginners to Macromedia Flash MX 2004. It aims to be a solid foundation to Flash MX 2004 within 465 pages. This is a perfect book for beginners who want to learn the most essential skills you need to use Flash MX 2004 Standard and Professional versions. It's time to analyze this book in depth.

Title: Foundation Macromedia Flash MX 2004
Authors: Kristian Besley, and Sham Bhangal
Publisher: Friends of Ed (A!Press)
ISBN: 1-59059-303-0
Click here to order

Nearly every chapter in the book consists of theory part and a case study part, in this case study part you will apply the things you learned earlier in the chapter. Throughout these case studies you will build a complete and fully functional website, a nice online portfolio.

The book starts with the basics of Flash; you will learn how to use the user interface Flash. It will explain the elements of the user interface such as: the Stage, the Timeline, and the Properties panel. In the third chapter you will learn to use Symbols. Understanding symbols and how to use them, is crucial if you want to learn Flash. A symbol is a particular kind of movie element in an flash movie, which you can reuse as much you want and how you can manage these different Symbols using the Library. In chapter four you will dive deeper in the managing of content of a Flash movie, learn how to arrange, align and nest objects. Once you are using Flash more and more, you may want to alter colours or images in a Flash movie -- you will learn this in Chapter 5.

A flash movie without animation, is like a car without engine. It's no fun. In chapter six of the book you learn how to make the various motion tweens and, it will explain how to use the Onion Skining feature in Flash. Onion Skinning is a technique used by creating animation cartoons to see several frames at once. You will also learn how to make convincing animation using easing.

Chapter 7 goes in detail about how to use Shape Tweens, Shape Tween can be compared to Morphing. You will morph a object at Point A to a object on Point B. This way you can make animations such as morphing a circle into a square. In combination with Masks you learn about in chaper 7. You can create nice animations. You can hide or reveal elements of an animation, or archive a sense of depth in your Flash movie.

Starting with Chapter 9 you will start with the "advanced" part of the book, in this part you will learn how to use Video and sound, and the scripting functionality using the script language ActionScript. In chapter 9 you will learn about interactivity, why it's important and how Flash implements this using behaviours and the Timeline Effects which are new in Flash MX 2004.

In chapter 10 you will learn about Actions and the scripting language ActionScript, using ActionScript you can control your Flash movie and add more interactivity. In this chapter you will learn the basics of ActionScript. In chapter 11 you continue with ActionScript. Now you will learn how to control symbols on the Stage using ActionScript.

Because Flash movie is nothing without using Sound or Video you will find in the next chapters how to import and use Audio and Video in Flash. Because Audio is one of those file size increasers you will learn in chapter 13 how to Optimize your Flash movie for use on the Internet. Too make your Flash ready to use on the Internet you will need to publish your movie, which will learn how to publish your movie in chapter 14.

In the next chapters you will dive more into ActionScript in the two intermediate ActionScript chapters you will learn how to plan larger scale Actionscripts, and how to let multiple Flash movies communicate with each other. You will also learn about the dot notion, and how to develop the object oriented way in Flash.

Conclusion
This book covers all the topics a Flash beginners needs to get a kick start on using Flash MX 2004,the book is easy-to-read and the examples throughout the book are simple but nice. Once you have done all these examples, and applied all the knowledge in the Case Studies you know everything to make your own nice Flash website. If you already know how to use the tools in Flash, and to make motion tweens, you probably won't need this book. Then you might want to consider a book only about ActionScript such as "Foundation ActionScript for Flash MX 2004" from one of the authors of this book.

All sourcecode and graphics used in the book are available for download from friendsofed.com

 

 

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