EVOLVE

Original Publish Date: 10/20/2006

Author(s): Jordan Chilcott, Tom Green
Paperback: 360 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (June 19, 2006)
ISBN: 159059651X
Overall Score: 3/5

As someone who has been working with video in Flash quite heavily recently at work, I was eagerly anticipating this book to be released. At first I wasn’t disappointed as the book has a great intro to video. It goes through a relatively thorough explanation of video and how it works on the net, talking about progressive and streaming downloading, and so on. As the title suggests, this book is a Foundation book so it is not code heavy and is perfect for beginners.

There is a chapter in the book about editing video, which if it is out of the scope of the book or not, is a very handy chapter. Not everyone in the world could afford huge software packages like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere (or After Effects, depends on how you like to do things I suppose). This chapter goes over how to edit video with some of the tools that come shipped with your OS, whether it be iMovie on OSX or Windows Movie Maker on PC.

Getting back to the whole code thing, as an ActionScript developer I sometimes get let down by not seeing a lot of code (although it really depends on how you see things, because not everyone is nerdy like me and would rather not sift through code and just do things a different way). Page 186 clearly warns that this book is about Flash video, not ActionScript programming, but I believe when doing video you HAVE to know how to code around it. I see some video apps on the web today and all they have is the default FLVPlayback component skin on them. That’s fine and dandy, but those things are ugly and everyone who knows how they were made just laughs at them.

Chapter 9 and chapter 11 get a bit more code heavy and even into some class programming, but the coding done throughout those chapters is geared more towards applying code to the video that make its stylized, a la blend modes and filters. To me, when I see a book on Flash video, I want to learn the ins and outs of controlling the video and making it do things like play videos in sequence, loading in the background, so on and so forth. I already know how to use blending modes and filters from the other great Friends of ED books (Flash 8 Essentials).

All in all, this really is a beginner book on video and if you’re looking for a way to learn to control your videos thoroughly in and out, you won’t find it here. If you just want to add some effects to your videos, this is the book for you.

Original Publish Date: 7/6/2006

Author(s): Michael Kemper, Guido Rosso, Brian Monnone
Paperback: 360 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (May 8, 2006)
ISBN: 1590595556
Overall Score: 4/5

When i first got this book, I didn’t really know what to expect. I didn’t know if it was going to be a design book or an animation book for interfaces. I guess what I eventually ended up getting was a little bit of both.

The early chapters of the book are definitely not “AdvancED”, but give some good insight on some topics that are normally overlooked. The one problem with this book is that it was trying to fit information about a lot of combined programs, such as Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, and Flash. However, this HAS to be done because of the way Flash interfaces are designed these days, so as a downfall it can be excused because sometimes it is unavoidable (and sometimes very handy) to know how to use all those programs.

There is a chapter on colors which is great, but the end of the chapter (page 56) talks about the Color class. The Color class is deprecated as of Flash 8 and I wish they would have went more in depth on using the new classes in 8, such as ColorTransform and the likes.

Now that we’ve got the negatives out of the way, it’s time to cover all the very formidable positives that this book has to offer. It has great explanations in every chapter of how to deal with good user experience and interface design. It’s obvious that the authors (award winners in this subject) know what they are talking about. For instance, on a personal level, I hate bringing in graphics into Flash from Illustrator and seeing all the miscellaneous graphic symbols that it makes while importing. Some people don’t clean this up in the library and it’s VERY frustrating to see all those symbols and have to go in and clean them up. These guys stress highly the importance of a clean library and have a great section in chapter 7 that shows how to clean these graphics up. I can’t tell you how many times I’d wished that people who work with me could make nice, clean libraries before they hand files over to me, but sometimes thats too much to ask for.

There is a chapter that makes mention of video and the best part about this chapter, after having recently made a project for AT&T that used Flash video, is the fact that it makes mention of the Flash 8 Video Encoder that comes bundled with Flash 8 Professional. It’s a stand alone application and nobody in my office actually knew what it was or how to use it (which for a large company such as I work for could be a bit mind boggling). They take you through the encoder and show you example usage, which is VERY handy when working with encoding FLV files. This chapter also boasts a great explanation (which I actually wish I had read before looking like a fool in an initial project meeting) of the video playback options that Flash has to offer (Streaming, Progressive, and Embedded video).

The middle of the book has a great color pullout (it’s not really a pullout, but ya know…) that demonstrates examples from the book and coincides with the color chapter (since obviously you want to see colors in a color chapter…). Chapter 9 is also an outstanding chapter which takes you from start to finish on how to design an interface in Photoshop (and 10 follows up with the proper way to import it into Flash so that you can work with those graphics). There is a section in this chapter titled “Moving from Photoshop to Flash” (pg. 232) which is a HUGE bonus. EVERYONE in the world who is a Flash designer/developer should convert graphics in the way that is described in this section. It saves a lot of time and headaches later on when you use the process outlined here.

Overall, the book was a treat. It started off a bit slow but definitely picked up a lot of momentum by the end. I’d definitely recommend it to someone who normally takes graphics from programs such as Illustrator or Photoshop and brings them into Flash. Conversely, I’d recommend it to designers who design for Flash developers as there is a lot of good information to learn from here.

Original Publish Date: 5/14/2006

Author(s): Todd Yard, Peter Elst
Paperback: 560 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (February 20, 2006)
ISBN: 1590596196
Overall Score: 5/5

I finally decided to take the plunge into OOP after I realized that is where Flash is headed. With the advent of ActionScript 3.0 around the corner (or out now if you’re already dabbling in it), you just know that everything is soon going to be class based. This book is a great start to your journey, as someone who originally started to read Colin Moock’s Essential ActionScript 2.0 will tell you. It is a LOT easier to read than EA2.0 as I’m not well versed on theory nor do I, at least at this point, really care that much about it. I’m one of those people who want to dive in and learn the syntax/usage, and then I’d like to figure out where it all stems from, not the other way around as it just makes it harder for me to learn that way.

The beginning chapters are great and teach you very much about the basics of OOP. If you’re an experienced programmer, you honestly probably won’t get much out of this book as this would all be stuff you already know. If you’re a beginner, however, this is perfect for you. As a pro (and a con on some level) of this book, some of the pages explain how to set up the document before you work on it. This is good for people who are new to Flash, but in my eyes if you’re new to Flash you shouldn’t be reading an OOP book to start you into programming as this won’t help you really learn the syntax. If you’re using this book, it should be assumed you already know the basic Flash syntax and won’t need to be told how to set the document size (pages 84-92 are basically wasted on setting up a document for coding one of the examples).

There is a chapter on design patterns that is really good and explains their functionality pretty well. One thing to note in this chapter is that it comes kind of early in the book and sometimes (at least for me) it was hard to grasp the whole concept of what the Model View Controller, for instance, was doing because I’m still not thinking in terms of OOP, rather procedural, so I had to go back and re-read some of the design pattern stuff a couple of times to fully understand it (and I’m not sure that I do still to this point, but that’s outside of the scope of this book).

The one knock I have on the book, which really is a non-issue to be honest, but it’s a bit funny to see all the editorial errors through these technical books. It makes you wonder if the editors really read the whole thing or just skim it.

I feel this book definitely gets me ready to move on to greener pastures, a la Essential ActionScript 2.0, which I should now be ready to dive into. I don’t feel like I’m an OOP expert after reading this, but I don’t think that was the main point of the book. Of course, I learn a lot slower than others because I have a design background and no programming background whatsoever, but the book was painless to read and I enjoyed it greatly.

Don’t get me wrong if this review is sounding half negative, the book is essential to anyone getting started with OOP (as I am), and I highly recommend it. I just tend to point out everything I notice and sometimes I don’t always write down all the positives so my reviews seem to lean towards the negative a bit more. In no way does this mean this book is bad, because it really isn’t; it’s a great book.

Original Publish Date: 1/1/2006

Author(s): Glen Rhodes, Todd Yard, Stephen Downs, Craig Swann, Matt Voerman, Paul Barnes-Hoggett
Paperback: 424 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (December 19, 2005)
ISBN: 1590595327
Overall Score: 4/5

I was really excited to see my copy of Flash 8 Essentials arrive as I’ve been looking for a place to read about all the new features of Flash 8 and how to use them. I definitely wasn’t disappointed in the book and the way it progressed along. The examples throughout the book are very good and help you understand the tools and how to use the new classes. On top of that, the last chapter in the book has four “bigger” examples that show you how to use some of the code you’ve learned to build bigger application-like projects, which is really cool to see. It’s always good to learn from the best on how they set up their projects and how they go about developing them.

The Flash 8 Video chapter is ridiculously good. I would get the book for this chapter alone. If you’ve tried to look at the VideoPlayer class in the Flash documentation you would know that, well, there really isn’t any help there for it. This chapter doesn’t go through ALL of the methods/properties (because damnit there is a ton of them) but gives you a good start on how to use some of those more useful new methods. If that wasn’t enough, the end of the chapter makes mention of a new title from friends of Ed in the works that is going to cover the WHOLE VideoPlayer class. I DEFINITELY can’t wait for that one. Oddly enough, while reading this book this past week, I was working on my next presentation for MMSUG which is on After Effects/Flash 8 video/new features, so this was a HUGE help in the process.

The BitmapData chapter is also very good as it covers almost all of the methods of the BitmapData class. There are a couple of methods that are left out with a reference to Flash help, but nonetheless it’s a really good chapter. The author takes you through the source image and output image on one file so that you can easily see the differences that are made by each method.

I think all of the chapters are pretty well written, with the exception of the ExternalInterface chapter. Don’t get me wrong, it serves its purpose and to its credit, the end states that the power of the ExternalInterface class is not really the class itself, but what you can do with it with your respective language of choice, but I think the examples weren’t as powerful as they could have been. There were also some small editing errors throughout the book, but none of them code specific, just some funny looking sentences being formed and even a hint of how the book is edited (one chapter has a line of code that shows where the bold and italics of the code were supposed to be made without actually making them so all you see is that text), which was in all actuality kind of cool to see because I always wonder how the process of putting books like this together goes (but that has nothing to do with the book itself, just my own personal curiosity).

Since the book is written by six different authors, as expected you can see the different teaching styles. Some chapters are explained MUCH better than others. Nonetheless, the book is still explained very well and that doesn’t mean that the other chapters aren’t explained, just not as well as the other ones. The only other beef I have with this book, but really all friends of Ed books (and this is simply due to me being lazy), is that I LOVE how they give you the example files (which are always available for download from their site), but they’re all the finished version of the files, as opposed to giving you the starting versions as well as the finished samples. I usually like to start off with a barebones file and write some code myself to get the file to where it should be, but in this state I have to delete all the code and some of the movie clips to redo them myself. This of course is a personal preference just because I learn better when I do the whole thing myself, so it gets a bit tedious to have to do that for all the files.

All in all, I highly suggest the book to anyone looking to catch up on the new features of Flash. Pretty much all of the features are outlined, in the IDE and through ActionScript.

Original Publish Date: 12/12/2005

Author(s): Sas Jacobs
Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: friends of ED (October 3, 2005)
ISBN: 1590595432
Overall Score: 3.5/5

As I wrote about a month ago, I got the new XML book from Friends of Ed titled Foundation XML for Flash by Sas Jacobs. Now, I’ve been doing a bunch of XML work over the past couple of months and have gotten accustomed to using XML in my projects to do just about any kind of data updating, so I’m pretty well versed in writing loops around XML to retrieve data and to set up my buttons and all that. That being said, on to the book review:

The book definitely had its up accompanied by a couple of downs. Firstly, the thing I loved about the book is that if you have no prior experience with XML, this is the perfect book for you. It walks you through almost everything you need to know about XML and teaches you how to set up some pretty simple XML usage examples to get the grasp of all the possible properties of the XML object in Flash. As you progress through the book, you get into using the XML components, which is something I haven’t even dabbled in personally for the simple fact that I prefer to have total control over my XML and I like to be able to edit/see the code to make sure I understand it (and since I wrote it I surely understand it…). The components definitely have their UPS, however, and its good for doing things like using web services or more advanced data binding.

Another thing I liked about the book was the fact that in the beginner chapters, where most beginners will learn the ropes of XML in Flash, Sas writes code that shows how to use pretty much all of the properties of the XML object, even though it’s not the most efficient way of writing the code. She goes on to explain in the chapter summary how to more effectively write the code, but seeing the usage of some of those properties/methods is definitely helpful in case you’re ever in a situation where you may benefit from them. The files the book uses are not available on a CD included, which is good because you don’t have the hard CD cover sleeve in the back of the book making it impossible to keep it open and they’re easily accessible from the Friends of Ed site (linked above) in the downloads section for the book.

Alternately, the cons of the book: For an XML for Flash book, there is way too much talk about Microsoft Office. I understand that sometimes this may come in very handy when your client gives you an Excel or Word file and you’re going to have to convert it into XML, but personally I don’t think that topic applies to too many people working with XML outside of a huge corporate environment. I know I’ve never been passed off any office documents and had to convert them into XML, but I do understand the need may arise sometime so it’s not entirely bad to put this in, but I don’t think it’s necessary to write four chapters on it as opposed to breezing over it.

The database scripting language used in the book is ASP which I found kind of weird considering XML, like PHP, is a free technology and it would only make sense to use PHP for the database scripting examples. In Sas’ defense, Friends of Ed has a book titled Foundation PHP 5 for Flash (which I also own and it is a very good book), so maybe covering some parts of it in ASP is not such a bad thing, just a personal preference for me to use PHP instead.

As I was forewarned by Pete Aylward, the Product Manager at Friends of Ed, that some screenshots in the book were printed at low quality. As promised, however, the good quality images were put online in case you need to refer to them at the friends of ED site.

Overall, as mentioned earlier, I think the book is great for people looking to dive right into XML who haven’t had any previous knowledge of the technology. There are even mentions of things like XSLT and CSS along with other closely related technologies to make you aware of everything you need to know about XML. Get it, let it sink in, and enjoy the wonderful world that is XML and Flash. I promise you, you’ll never want to do manual updating again.

On a related note, check out my XML image gallery source code to get some more insight into XML and Flash. It is fully commented to help understand what is going on in the file.