Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Flash CS3 from a designer's point of view
Comment: The approach taken by Tom Green and David Stiller in this book is to teach Flash CS3 from a designer's point of view. However, Flash CS3 is a powerful tool and it is impossible to avoid some programming in any book such as this. The authors have used only ActionScript 3.0 which was introduced with Flash CS3. One nice feature of the book is that the working examples are not just a rehashing of the same old examples that you will find in most books about Flash. The authors have made a great effort to use fun and interesting examples for each topic-based chapter to make learning Flash almost painless for the designer and artist.
The authors take the usual progression when teaching Flash. They begin with a tour of the workspace and cover the basic steps to building a Flash project. Next, you learn graphics and color. With Flash CS3, the integration between Flash and the other Adobe software is greatly improved and the ability to import graphics into your Flash project that have been created in other programs is an important production asset. The book covers this and other topics such as drawing your own graphics with the Flash drawing tools.
Symbols are the backbone of any Flash project and the Flash Library is a must for organizing your assets for a large project. The authors cover these as well as 9-slice scaling, tracing bitmaps, group and nesting, filters, blends and masks. I especially enjoyed the newer soft masking example.
By the time you reach chapter four, you enter the world of Flash ActionScript and the Actions panel. Here you get just enough introduction to ActionScript programming but not enough to overwhelm the designer and artists. The authors cover the basics such as objects, variables, data types and conditionals. From this point, you move on to more advanced topics that do require a little ActionScript including audio and video. You will build an MP3 player and use ActionScript to handle multiple audio files. The Superman movie example will teach you how to work with video, add captions and set full-screen options.
The authors have a little fun when discussing the various ways to use text in Flash projects. You learn the basics such as creating scrolling text but you also learn how to blow it up. Up to this point, you have only touched on animation. Now it is time to cover animation more thoroughly. The authors use great examples to teach animation basics including tweening and easing.
Flash CS3 has improved many of the built-in components and added a few new ones. The authors introduce you to UI elements and how to use ActionScript to control them in your online application projects. Next, they discuss using CSS and XML to add style and dynamic data to your projects. One of the newest Flash topics is creating Flash for mobile devices. The authors discuss Device Central and Flash Lite 2. Finally, you are ready to discuss publishing considerations such as bandwidth and optimizing your SWF files. You will also create a simple preloader and convert your SWF to QuickTime format.
Tom Green is currently an author and Professor at Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto, Canada. David Stiller is a career multimedia programmer/designer and author.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for a beginner
Comment: For my first serious approach to Flash I was looking for a book easy to read, and that covers not just the basics but some code teaching too. I picked this based on the reviews and I'm by far very satisfied with the book and my progress with Flash.
The book is really easy to follow thanks, not just to the expertise of the authors, but also the way it was written. One little thing I didn't like about the book is that the pictures are black and white with a poor contrast, and when the authors use them as a reference for some exercises is disappointing not being able to see what they're talking about; but this is like I said, in some exercises and examples, so if you're following the tutorial properly it wont represent a real issue.
Customer Rating:
Summary: very good...
Comment: I got my book very fast thank you... And was it was just like new what was nice thank you for that too... And I buy all my books for Amazon so I will be buying more and more books from here....
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A good starting book!
Comment: Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers is a great introduction to Flash for those new to the program. It will definately show you all the basic to intermediate things Flash can do. Covers the basics of AS3 quite well. However this book would be a waste of money for the more experienced user. Teaches nothing above the intermediate level.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers the Book
Comment: There are lots of errors in the book such as telling someone to close the same window three times or press ok to close the window and it repeats itself to press ok to close the window. Also open the transform dialog box and they don't tell you where it is, so you have to guess. I am using this book in a class on Flash and my teacher and the rest of us are lest then impressed considering that we are only into the fourth chapter and we have already found more than twenty errors of this kind. Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers (Foundation)
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