Book review: Brilliant Flash CS3 Professional

The first thing that strikes you about this book is that it's FULL colour. Every page. That's 572 pages! And at a fraction of the price of many other books on the market. But is it any good?

TITLE: Brilliant Flash CS3 Professional
AUTHOR: Andy Anderson & Steve Johnson
PUBLISHER: Pearson
ISBN: 978-0-273-71439-2
PAGES: 572 colour
CD: No
PRICE: £16.99 UK

Well I'm glad to say it is. In fact it's very good. What impresses most is the structure and layout of the book. Colour has been used throughout, not only to render the diagrams and screenshots but to colour code every chapter. Features that are new to CS3 are identified throughout and briefly collated in an appendix at the end.

Any one of the 23 chapters can be found by glancing at the colour bands on the side of the book. Each chapter consists of 10 to 20 distinct tasks that each receive one or two pages of explanation. Each task has a short descriptive title ("Importing bitmaps" for example) and a few paragraphs of longer discussion. Then follows step by step instructions with fully annotated screenshots explaining how to complete the task. Points of interest and gotchas are explained in side panels as you go along. The final section wraps everything up with seven workshops that take what you've learned and put it all together.

This is a confidently written book that understands it's target audience. It won't teach you programming (although you will cover all of the standard components) and you won't get into heavy application development. In fact, thank god for Flex. We no longer have to build applications in Flash, which means that tech writers no longer have to dedicate huge chunks of their books to telling you how to do it.

This is a beautifully constructed book that will very much to appeal to designers and other 'visual thinkers'. It's a great introduction to Flash CS3 and will prove an invaluable visual reference for beginning and intermediate Flashers.

 

About John Dalziel

John Dalziel is a founding member of FlashMagazine and regularly reports from community events in the UK. He has also written for Macromedia, New Riders, Actionscript.com and Ultrashock.com.

 

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