Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Macromedia Flash MX 2004: Visual QuickStart Guide
Comment: Straightforward and well written. I like the sidebars that provide tips and extra related items.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Great reference book, crappy design book
Comment: Imagine buying a simple electronic device, bringing it home, and then discovering a 600-page step-by-step directional manual for setting it up. This is how the visual quickstart guide explains designing a web site. This book has a full segment on how to use a pen tool. We all know how to use the pen tool- a monkey can use the pen tool. If you can coherently read a scientific manual- have at it, if you're like me, and you need to put it in practice and have a sample project to work on (I realize I have been spoiled by the Classroom In a Book series), then you cannot use this book. All I wanted to do was to expand my graphics ability, not become a master Flash guru.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent teacher
Comment: The lessons are written in plain language with an abundance of illustrations. It is one of the best computer books I have ever read. It takes a very complex program and breaks it down to simple steps.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Tedious as a tutorial, but a good reference book
Comment: This book is essentially a REFERENCE book. It can be used to learn Flash, but only if you plan to set aside all of your free time for the next year to work through all of the lessons. It moves too slowly and most novice users will become bored and quit before they even learn how to use all of the drawing tools.
As a reference, it is indispensible. Need to know the difference between an animated graphic symbol and a movie clip? It's all explained in detail. I use this book as a quick reference whenever I need to know how to do something. I can usually find it in here and implement it within 20 minutes (rather than working through a long tutorial).
My only complaint about this book is that it is basically a revised edition of a book that was written for an early version of Flash. The editors do a pretty good job of updating the sections, but I have found that some eccentricities of Flash are not covered. For example, if you use the color mixer to do a color change (motion) tween, it won't work. The book does not tell you that you need to change the colors through the property inspector. These sorts of things can occasionally lead to hours of frustration.
I would have to say that this is the best Flash REFERENCE on the market, but it isn't perfect. I would not recommend working through the chapters sequentially (like a tutorial) because it is too slow.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very simple approach
Comment: This book might be good for people that have never opened flash but for anyone that even knows a bit of flash stay away. It is a real boring read, well for me anyway. It did more of just explaining icons in the program, which is cool, but if you bought flash, you can open the help file for that.
The writer doesn't seem extremely proficient in Flash which is scary to think. Flash is a complicated program, and for a book being close to 600 pages, it might get you past the toolbars.
I ran through this book in about a day with it really teaching me nothing new or anything for that matter.
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