Special Edition Using Macromedia Studio MX 2004, 1/e

Rating:
Summary: WEAK!!!!
Review: Just bought the book like 2 days ago...fingered threw the pages and decided that its a pretty worthless book. Even the novice reader should avoid it. Its poorly laid out, and there arn't really any tutorials or anything in depth...this is more of a book that focuses on what the features are, and thats not even that good. If you were interested in learning about macromedia studio mx, I would buy the "from the source" series, as they are much more in depth.

Rating:
Summary: Deep Flash & Dreamweaver, shallow Freehand & Fireworks
Review: This book touts itself as being "the only MX book you'll ever need." So why was there such shallow coverage for Freehand and Fireworks?

I bought this book from the bookstore and in glancing through it, it appeared it had everything I would need. And for web page stuff, it does - above & beyond. However, when it came time for me to work on a new logo, and of course along with that comes brochures, business cards, letterhead, etc. I then discovered that the book doesn't even touch on these subjects, nor does it do a decent job explaining how to use the "Xtra" tools for working with paths (among many other things) it just tells what they are and what they do (by name). The internal Help applet does a better job than this book does! There's a tutorial on how on the author designed a logo, but that's pretty much where the topic on Freehand ends. Desktop publishing & prepress people beware!

Nevertheless, it's a "good book" overall.. Three stars.. And I appreciated the depth in terms of Actionscript, XML, and ColdFusion architecture and the CFML / SQL coding primer.