Customer Rating:  
Summary: Not this one...
Comment: I enjoyed some previous visual quickstart series but this one did not do it for me. The project is butt ugly (pinks, purples, and greens) and the instructions are murky, leaving you lost if something doesnt work.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well organized, easy-to-follow "Getting Started" guide
Comment: I'm a Flash "newbie" who has just completed "Creating a Web Site with Flash CS3 Professional," cover to cover. In my career as a software evangelist for more than 20 years, I have written many tutorials and demonstration scripts similar to this book, which I found to be very well organized. It introduces the reader not only to techniques, but to best practices as well. And, unlike many of the online Flash tutorials in which you create a simple movie with a few animated circles or squares, in this book you create a sophisticated, good looking Web site.
Yes, about a third of the way through the book the author begins to assume your knowledge of things already covered, and it becomes somewhat more difficult to follow the instructions. And a few times I had to go back and redo something I had done incorrectly at first. But in the end I had a fully functioning Web site, and I learned a lot about Flash CS3 along the way.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Avoid This One
Comment: After being forced to buy this book for a web design course, about 15 classmates and I slogged through about two-thirds of this book before using it for skeet shooting. I am somewhat familiar with Flash from a 16-hour class, a full-semester course, various training videos on [...], and many web tutorials. Despite this modicum of knowledge, I found this book confusing, frustrating, and just plain wrong.
As other reviewers have indicated, the illustrations are poorly conceived, steps are missing or out of order, and it uses ActionScript 2.0 although this is CS3 version of this book. It's true this is a "project" in Flash, not a systematic teaching text, but even those quite familiar with the program were having trouble following this workbook.
Building an entire website in Flash can yield a very cool presentation (Starbucks and JK Rowling come to mind), but this would probably NOT be the best way to learn Flash initially. This book may have some value to exprienced designers and Flash mavens looking to begin working entirely in Flash, but for most folks, it's a waste of money.
Customer Rating:
Summary: starts off ok....
Comment: I think the idea of a project guide is sound - walking you through the steps of creating a 'practice' site to get you familiar with the tools, but this particular instance isn't very well done. The book starts off ok, but towards the middle, around chapter 6, it starts to get really confusing, especially in relation to the timeline, one of the key aspects of Flash. The author did a poor job of displaying the workspace - cropped sections of the timeline, covered with activated menus make it hard to see what is going on. Also, the basic layout of the page could use some improvement - small snippets of text jump all over the page, when the instructions are numbered (sometimes they are, sometimes they're not. it's kind of like a game.) the numbers aren't prominent or aligned. Overall - good idea, bad execution. I would love a different book that takes me through the construction of a project, just not this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Basic Example to Supplement Your Learning
Comment: If you're looking for an introduction to the Flash CS3 program then this isn't the book for you. However, if you are starting out in Flash and web development, and want a very basic website example to get you started this book will hold your hand. But it definitely needs to be supplemented with other Flash resources. If you *have* built a website before you probably do not need this book, either.
It's not difficult to follow, and it's not meant to be complex in either the text or the example. What else can I say; it is what it is, and the scope of the book is pretty clearly stated. AS2 is still widely used so I can live with it being used here...there's so little scripting in the book it doesn't matter anyhow.
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