Book review: FMX2004 AS2 for creatives

Imagine for a minute you're a designer. You've just bought Flash MX 2004 and you've decided to finally take the plunge into programming. With a bit of trepidation, you are down at your local book store skimming through the titles for a book that's aimed towards creatives. Looking at the title 'Understanding Flash MX 2004 Actionscript 2: Basic techniques for creatives', would seem to be the perfect choice.

TITLE: Understanding Flash MX 2004 Actionscript 2: Basic techniques for creatives
PUBLISHER: Focal Press
ISBN: 0-240-51931-0
PAGES: 259 b&w
CD: No
AUTHOR: Alex Michael

Unfortunately what you get bares little relation to the title. There is (and I cannot stress this enough) NOTHING AT ALL about Actionscript 2 in this book. There is in fact NOTHING AT ALL about Flash MX 2004. This is a Flash MX book with the words Flash MX 2004 Actionscript 2 on the cover.

I'm not sure whose fault this is but my suspicions lie more with the publisher than the writer. Alex Michael is a knowledgeable Flash designer whose previous book, 'Animating with Flash MX' is well worth picking up. On this occasion however he seems to have been ill-served by both his publisher and his editors.

All the clues are on the cover. The image is really cool but overlaid on top of this are faded blocks of Actionscript code. Fine in itself but take one look at the code and you'll see plenty of Flash 5 syntax (onClipEvent) and god forbid Flash 4 syntax (setProperty). For a book that purports to teach you AS2, this is not a good start.

Let's forget for a minute about the whopping great AS2 ruse on the cover and treat this book for what it is; a Flash MX book aimed at creatives. The good news is that Alex is an experienced designer so he knows the audience he's pitching to. His chapters at the end about games and effects are great examples of his capabilities. Like a lot of animators though his code is peppered with all the bad habits and deprecated syntax brought on by numerous incarnations of Actionscript. There is a lot of (often needless) _root going on as well as random capitalisation of variable names.

I'm guessing the random capitalisation weirdness got in somewhere between the writing and the layout process as it is scattered all the code examples in the book. stop() becomes Stop() and trace() becomes Trace() etc. Also bizarrely, every instance of inverted commas in the code has become two apostrophes. Type any of that into Flash and the compiler will just gag out an error. There is no excuse for not catching this during proofreading. What annoys me is that when you're learning to program, getting to grips with syntax is the hardest thing. You have to trust the book.

Every time I tried to like this book it just let me down again. I think the message is right. Designers should be learning to program - it's an extremely liberating skill to have. They should however be learning how to write clean maintainable code. The buckshot code brought on by the likes of on() is the design equivalent of the lens flair. It'll get the job done but it's totally overused and it's beginning to look a little dated.

Getting back to the Flash MX 2004 in the title - there are two full chapters on working with MX components and a discussion of expert vs normal mode. Can you imagine sitting down with this book and your copy of MX2004? Where did that guy get the scrollbar component? Why can't I get into normal mode? Shameless.

I believe teaching designers to program (and vice versa) is absolutely key to future innovation within our industry. There are just far too many problems with this book to recommend it but they all pale against the charade of taking an MX book and slapping MX2004 on the cover. That is just unforgivable.

Focal Press

 

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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