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Rating: 
Summary: not the best
Review: Highly disappointed with this book... it has many techniques that (while colorful) are just not useful ... such as creating bubbles or a kaleidoscope.
The one or two techniques I DID find useful... I was unable to properly do it in the way it was instructed. However when looking in similar books, I found instructions much more useful elsewhere. I recommend Macromedia's Flash MX Bible - which although doesn't have step by step instructions for these type of flash functions - it does have more efficient and reliable methods of instruction.
This book also spent quite a bit of time talking about vector and bitmap images, which we all know can easily be done in alternate programs such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator, and although Flash may allow us to do it... I don't see the point as making such a big fuss on how to do it.
I would have been much more satisfied had there been techniques I could actually USE on a professional website, rather than cheesy techniques intended for beginner personal flash sites.
This book also covers cascading menus, progress display bars, creating a clock, a 3D book as an interface, form validation (this is a good one but I couldn't figure it out), scrolling virtual panoramas (I ended up buying a program to do this for me since their instruction was hard to understand), swarming dots into text, rotating 3D logos (really really cheesy), tabbed menus, draggable menus, creating ripples, drawing lines with a hand, an onscreen paint program, even a drumset.
Get the book if you want... maybe good for beginners just wanting to play with flash features. But not something intermediate users can learn a whole lot from.
Rating: 
Summary: One star for every USEFUL technique...
Review: I gave this book 1 star for every useful technique that I found in it. You do the counting.
Needless to say, I am very disappointed with my purchase. If you are, like me, an intermediate Flash developer looking to add a few new tricks to your bag, you are out of luck. Most of the techniques in this book are either too primitive or unusable in the field, or both...
Rating: 
Summary: Easy to learn
Review: I think this is a great book for beginners. They give you some easy plans to follow step-by-step (so you don't screw-up) so hopefully by the end of the book you can really do some damage by yourself. Bonus: They give you all the source codes and pictures so you don't have to start from scratch.
The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because some of the techniques are really useless like creating a calculator!
Rating:
Summary: Easy to learn
Review: I think this is a great book for beginners. They give you some easy plans to follow step-by-step (so you don't screw-up) so hopefully by the end of the book you can really do some damage by yourself. Bonus: They give you all the source codes and pictures so you don't have to start from scratch.
The only reason I gave it 4 stars instead of 5 is because some of the techniques are really useless like creating a calculator!
Rating:
Summary: Very disappointing book
Review: This book looks like you will learn a lot as there are 50 tutorials.Unfortunately, many are redundant, many are not really significant (not really useful, just funny), and the last one is a filler as it teaches you how to make a projector. If you are buying this book from a library, take your time to review the center page that display each "Technique" in color. It is worth half the price it costs. Not a great deal anyway. At least, you get the source files. This book is for beginner who wants to have a bit of fun.
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