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Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers
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List Price:
$39.99
Global Home Business Price:
$26.39
Your Savings: $ 13.60 ( 34% )
Subject To Change Without Notice
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: friends of ED
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 006.78
EAN: 9781590598610
ISBN: 159059861X
Label: friends of ED
Manufacturer: friends of ED
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 600
Publication Date: 2007-07-24
Publisher: friends of ED
Studio: friends of ED
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Editorial Reviews:
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Flash is one of the most engaging and innovative, and versatile technologies available—allowing the creation of pretty much anything from simple slideshows, animated banners and icons and cartoons, to Rich Internet Applications, Interactive videos, and dynamic user interfaces for web sites, kiosks, or DVDs. The possibilities are endless, except that now, it just got better. In 2007, Adobe released Flash CS3, which boasts a whole host of new features, including fully customizable workspace, full ActionScript 3.0 support, a PSD importer, a tween-to-code animation converter, and much more. And this book is all you'll need to learn Flash CS3 from the ground up, or learn about all these new features, if you already have previous Flash experience—Flash experts Tom Green and David Stiller take you step-by-step through all facets of Flash CS3, with the emphasis firmly on good design techniques that you use in your own projects. You can discover more about this book, download source code, and even view video tutorials at the book's companion site: www.foundationflashcs3.com. - Learn Flash design from the ground up, or just get to grips with the new features, with a series of step by step tutorials.
- Provides an easy introduction to ActionScript 3.0 coding, but the focus is mainly kept on design.
- Learn from the expertswritten by renowned Flash designers Tom Green and David Stiller.
What youll learn - The ins and outs of the Flash CS3 interface
- How to use all of Flash CS3's essential features, such as text, graphics, and animation
- How to use video and sound effectively in Flash
- The basics of ActionScript 3.0
- Building Flash user interfaces rapidly using components.
- How to populate a Flash movie with dynamic data such as XML.
- The Basics of creating Flash Lite applications (Flash for mobile devices)
- Using Cascading Style Sheets with Flash
- Optimizing and publishing your Flash movies
Who is this book for? This book is for both beginners who want a solid grounding in Flash CS3, and designers with previous Flash experience, who want to get up to speed with the new features. Summary of Contents - Chapter 1: Learning the Flash CS3 Professional
- Chapter 2: Graphics in Flash CS3
- Chapter 3: Symbols and Libraries
- Chapter 4: ActionScript Basics
- Chapter 5: Audio in Flash CS3
- Chapter 6 Text in Flash CS3
- Chapter 7: Animation in Flash CS3
- Chapter 8: Video in Flash
- Chapter 9: Using the Flash UI Components to Build Interfaces
- Chapter 10: CSS and Flash
- Chapter 11: Dynamic Data (XML) and Flash
- Chapter 12: Going Mobile in Flash
- Chapter 13: Optimizing Flash Movies
- Chapter 14: Publishing Flash Movies
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Flash scared me
Comment: Let me be clear on this. I'm a professional, experienced designer who is very comfortable with other Adobe products such as Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign. I've even done video work before in Final Cut. So I figured Flash couldn't be that complicated, right? Wrong. My first time opening the application was like trying to understand a foreign language. Flash scared me, and I put it away for several months.
Then I found this book, and it has become my rosetta stone. It took a while to wrap my head around the concepts of Flash, and there were many hours of frustration as my tutorials never seemed to come out right. So I agree with the negative reviewers that Flash is difficult, but that is because of the program itself, not this book, which was an excellent guide for my learning. Tom Green and David Stiller have a friendly writing style that is easy to read and comprehend, and their joking nature makes the book far more enjoyable than it might otherwise be. I am now as comfortable in Flash as I am in the other Adobe programs, and this book still rides shotgun with me through all my projects.
Let me also add that the book's assistance doesn't stop within its pages. David Stiller maintains a blog (http://www.quip.net/blog/) on which he answers Flash questions and provides additional resources. After struggling with a particular Flash problem for days and not figuring out the answer, I emailed David and asked if he had any ideas. He didn't have to answer my email -- that's not his job, after all -- but he did, and even took the time to walk me through some possible solutions. From there I was able to figure out the rest on my own. I was very impressed with his generosity, because in the design world, time really is money.
I know there are other books out there that delve into more of the specifics of Flash and Actionscript, but if you are a true beginner like I was, this book is for you. You don't have to be scared of Flash anymore.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Helped a lot
Comment: This book was required for a Flash course I took. Didn't think much of it at first, but as the semester went on having this book made a huge difference. A lot of useful information for beginners
Customer Rating:
Summary: Solid Introductory Text
Comment: This book has been excellent accompaniment for the Flash course I've been taking! Unfortunately, it goes little beyond what I was able to learn in class in about 10 sessions. It was an excellent resource to refer to when trying to use the basic techniques that I learned in the last few months, but when it came to building larger projects, the book stopped at about the depth of my introductory class.
The main issue for me is that the book attempts to touch on every aspect of flash, at the expense of reaching notable depth in any. Thus, many sections are overladen with introductory, conceptual descriptions and it takes a while to get to the limited practical knowledge before the next section has arrived. The most memorable example of this occurred when I was trying to work with audio. Just as the book got beyond the basics of bitrate and explained how to make play and stop buttons, it moved on, effectively dropping me when I needed it to move beyond basic sound control components. A jack of all trades is a master of none, as they say.
If you're looking for a book to teach you the basics of many techniques, then this is exactly the reference for you, but if you're looking for a definitive reference I would try other books. My review might sound negative, but it is an excellent book if you're not looking to delve too much deeper.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good information but not for a beginner in Flash
Comment: Before buying this book I had never used Flash. Luckily, I was taking a course and did not have the need to rely on this book completely. Although it was hard to follow at times, the book served its purpose as a supplement to the course. It was easy to find specific sections when I needed extra help on a certain topic. In particular, the action script section was extremely helpful because they were able to make one of the most difficult conepts in flash relatively easy to understand.
Although this book was a good reference for my flash class, I think it would be extremely difficult to teach yourself how to use flash by simply reading this book. I do not recommend it to beginners. The lessons are confusing because they leave many terms undefined and the steps are not detailed enough.
Overall, if you have some basic flash experience and simply looking to grasp the more difficult concepts, I recommend this book. If you are a complete beginner, I think there are better books out there for the basic information since this was is lacking in a thorough explanation of the timeline and the beginning components that go along with it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great Reference Guide for Flash...
Comment: This book provides a very intricate look into all that flash has to offer. I approached this book in taking a flash class and having had no previous experience with the program. That being said, chapter two was particularly useful in getting to know the program, especially the uses of all of the tools. Furthermore, chapter 4 on actionscript was useful in getting aquatinted with the rather difficult/ complicated language. However, I felt that, while there was much information, it was rather difficult to follow along with. The book uses technical language that (as a first time/ inexperienced user/ reader) was time consuming to understand. Furthermore, the book uses examples within flash, which, if you were just looking for a quick answer to a question, was difficult, time consuming, and aggravating to seek out. I personally felt that the book drew out topics, rather thank keeping the concepts as simple as possible, rather than complicating/ hiding them within other concepts. That being said, I do believe that some of these issues arose from the complexity of the program itself. However, the authors could have published a more "user friendly" text.
The book was written in a logical and progressive form. The authors would repeatedly refer back to items previously mentioned, which was good in the sense that the text was interrelated, but negative in the sense that one would have to have a firm understanding of that material to understand the topic at hand, which often proved to be extremely time consuming. The detailed table of contents was very useful for navigating around topics, however. Overall, while I did have some issues with the text (the majority of which came from my skills/ lack thereof), it proved to be very useful and essential to gain an understanding of a very complex, yet incredible useful program.
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