Sams Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 5 in 24 Hours

Built around four main sections, the book starts out by teaching us the basics: using the native painting and drawing tools, importing prepared material, and using Flash Libraries for reusing material. During these early chapters, readers are introduced to the tools, palettes, windows, and features of Flash 5.

Screen shots appear on every page, and each step and description is clear even to the novice. Some pages also feature sidebars that offer tips, ideas, and explanations of the task at hand. These are generally one paragraph or so, but often shed light on a difficult concept. After focusing on animation and different ways of animating objects, the book opens the doors to interactivity, where you begin using interactive features, creating animated buttons, and using Actions to create nonlinear movies.

Although it's designed for the beginner, the book touches on some of the more advanced concepts of Flash in its last few chapters. Using Flash in a team environment, optimizing a Flash site to get the most out of the medium, and exploring advanced animation concepts like anticipation, exaggeration, and simulating depth are introduced, although none of these sections gets too involved. It's more of a way to introduce the designer to what's possible and suggest avenues for further study.

Favorite features of the books in the Teach Yourself series are the summary, Q&A, and Workshop sections that are at the end of each hour (or chapter). The summary reinforces everything that was covered, the Q&A section answers about a half dozen of the more commonly asked questions on the material, and the Workshop is generally a quiz or short assignment that's designed to make use of the features or techniques that were just learned. These chapter features make this an excellent course book.

Flash 5 offers the Web-based animator a large array of features, and Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash 5 in 24 Hours is an excellent introduction to most of them. --Mike Caputo