Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: OVER RATED FOR NOVICES!
Comment: On the upside, the tutorials on installation are excellent. Apache, PHP 5 installation and if you get that far, the MySQL installation are all well described and carefully written. The forum works, if you happen to be a programmer. Theres quick help for those seeking answers but not so quick if you are novice...
When you get into trouble is when you realize that version changes make understanding the complex code jargon very difficlut to understand- though coded exaples for the Flash version that I have were provided. The examples are impossibly long and complicated and when you finally sift though them Eureka, it does not work. FRUSTRATING. Though said to have working examples, I could not get the tedious long examples to work on my computer- and spent many hours re reading the entire book to find out why. I did not expect a quick and easy solution to learning but after two months, I made no progress and found my incompetnce with programming becomiing overwhelming. This book may kill your desire to learn, even if you are willing to spend the time.
This book is a time bandit. Phenomonally complicated for beginners, it's written for experienced programmers, though said to be for novices. It has been my experience to see most programmers who write books, write at a level that is not possible to understand by beginners. It's like going into a new city and asking for directions from a local resident, " it's easy to find and you can't miss it " is the norm. Powers may leave you sleeping on the street.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Very good book on integrating php and mysql with Flash
Comment: I was very pleased with the book. I like the author's style, and I especially like how the projects are more than your typical "hello world" examples. Yes, some of them do take a little time, but you can type them out or read along as you wish, and they don't take that much time. I thought the book was absolutely excellent at accomplishing what it sets out to do - show you how to integrate flash with PHP and MySQL. Very nice job.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Such a rare find, and great writing.
Comment: Bah! Who so ever has a bad review concerning this book are those who think that there's a magical, simple solution in making advanced web sites in Flash. Over the years Flash rapidly went from being that Goofy web toy through versions 3-4, to being something that you could potentially make something...practical. With a lot of voodoo, and enough time on your hands. To an actual application development environment...if you were "down" for some XML. But since the advent of Flash MX 2004, it became a full on scary piece of application software, ready to contend with all the full forced development environments such as VB.net and so fourth.
There's only one problem. Macromedia is legendary for giving you arcane, nearing on esoteric text as to how you actually use it's products. The marketing behind that is, of course...so you buy books. Lots and lots of books. Only, the Macromedia books in question STILL don't give you enough information to actually do anything on an intensive level with Flash. You learn as to how to make each of the components work on their own. You can make a quick and dirty web service connection. You can learn how to change the appearance of those components as well. You also can get a huge lesson as to the advancement of Actionscript 1.0 to Actioscript 2.0 But you're never given enough information as to how to develop a REAL web site. UNLESS: you're to use their even more expensive product...ColdFusion. Then, the doors are unleashed to all these various and wonderful things one can do with Flash.
And again, tell me what web hosting solution provides CF at an affordable price? Uh...yeah. That's why the world has gone PHP mad.
So, here we have on one side of the fence, the worlds most controversial (yet very sexy) piece of gadgetry that no one has been able to use quite right. On the other hand, we have the most popular web scripting language in the world. Advanced enough to make enterprise web apps if so needed, but typically used on a much more "simplistic" level but a more "creative" Market...which can be argued as those creative designers who sought out to develop more technical skills to use Flash properly, and ended up learning PHP...because PHP ends up what more people want in the first place.
However, in comes David...and his book. And David basically says "I'll show you how to plug in both these technologies"...And I can not for the life of me understand how people can't get the basics. In the first round, he basically explains the one simple step into all our inner connectivity issues: loadVars. For those who have any sort of dilemma in understanding after reading this book, there's the one big hint as to what you can rummage around in the Macromedia vaults, and perhaps even a Google search now and then.
Having a book that is project driven, verses simple little code snippets takes care of two problems in one fell swoop. Not only do we get to see the magic of the loadVars in action, over and over again. We are offered great ideas to implement on web sites. I mean, the first example: AN EMAIL FORM! And a content management system? (and a token Hangman game, because Flash is great for that!) This is fantastic...one is given the blue print for real web site solutions through this book.
My only "complaint" Why not have an entire corporate site delved out in Flash? I mean, there's more hype than there's actual results (not that I don't believe in Flash)...And the only real example I've ever seen on a larger level is the Macromedia exchange for downloading Extensions.
So, I am intensely enthusiastic about this book (and the writing. Very clear and very friendly). But I would want a volume II, and I want an advanced corporate type site developed in that one!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Examples are unwieldy.
Comment: I didn't care for this book. I was hoping it would go through the basics of sending information from Flash to MySQL via PHP, but it was a disappointment. The main problem with this book is that it teaches by presenting the reader with overly complicated examples. Rather than using bite-sized examples, the author uses a couple of very large projects that the reader is expected to wade through and decipher. Yes, the examples do have comments but it's extremely laborious to decipher all of that code just to get the information you need. I've worked through to page 370 so far and haven't yet learned how to send "hello world" from Flash to a MySQL database and it's not possible to just look that up somewhere. You have to go through and understand the huge examples in their entirety before you can understand any part of them. For someone who is learning this, the examples look like spaghetti code. They are too unwieldy.
Yes, there is a tutorial theme with this book, but the tutorial part is for PHP, not for ActionScript or how to connect the two. When the author gets around to integrating ActionScript with PHP that's when the huge examples and the resulting confusion comes in.
There can't be a very large audience for this book. The step-by-step part in the beginning teaches PHP and there's plenty of other books on the market that do a much better job of that. There's a small section that covers MySQL, but there's plenty of better books that teach MySQL. There is virtually no instruction of ActionScript just code examples and comments. What makes this book different from the other PHP or MySQL books is that it presumably teaches how to use PHP and MySQL with ActionScript. The problem is it does a poor job of that.
You have to wade through multiple lines of digression to get to the main point. When you do get to the main point, the explanation is often confusing. The workflow is not effective. The parts that need explanation are not explained and parts that don't need explanation are covered in a wordy fashion. This book does not have the polish that others like the Hands on Training series, or the Heads Up series have. I don't feel that the author has put himself in the place of the reader. This book needs an editor. Evidently they don't do that at "friends of Ed", but I'm not sure how one would go about editing this book. It would have to be gone over line-by-line. The result would be an entirely different book.
In its favor, the examples are kind of interesting although I'm not interested in the examples, I'm interested in learning the code. The website is up to date. There are a few mistakes in the code, but not many. Although the couple of mistakes that I encountered were not on the errata page.
I gave it 3 stars because the book is not terrible, it just falls down in a lot of important areas. It does have some teaching value and I plan to go back to it after I have more knowledge of the subject matter, but it will probably stay on my shelf for a while.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not exactly what I expected to be
Comment: This book is a really good book to start learning PHP. I wished I had this book a couple of years earlier, it would've saved me a lot of time and money. But this is actually the whole problem with this book. Yes, it covers flash, but it'll only learn you how you can work with PHP-variables in Flash. There are no projects that covers creating a complete flash project with PHP, it'll learn you how to create the scripts for Flash, so Flash can use the script. These tutorials can be found anywhere on the internet, so you don't really need this book.
It learns you more about PHP than Flash. Maybe I expected too much from it, but that's my opinion. After all, it's a good book for starting with PHP in flash.
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