Product Description

With Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, millions of Photoshop users may be installing Flash for the first time and Flash CS3 Professional for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide is there to show them what to do. From basic first steps, such as exploring the drawing tools, including Flash CS3's new Pen tool, to frame-by-frame animation, motion tweening, and shape tweening, this book serves as the beginner's guide to Flash. But it doesn’t stop there: sections on interactivity, sound, and video have been fully updated to demonstrate best practices in ActionScript 3.0, as well as the latest in Flash's video technology.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #170056 in Books
• Published on: 2007-08-09
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

From the Back Cover
With Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, millions of Photoshop users may be installing Flash for the first time and Flash CS3 Professional for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide is there to show them what to do. From basic first steps, such as exploring the drawing tools, including Flash CS3's new Pen tool, to frame-by-frame animation, motion tweening, and shape tweening, this book serves as the beginner's guide to Flash. But it doesn’t stop there: sections on interactivity, sound, and video have been fully updated to demonstrate best practices in ActionScript 3.0, as well as the latest in Flash's video technology.

About the Author
Katherine Ulrich is a writer and editor specializing in graphics, publishing and multimedia software. Her career includes 12 years at Macworld magazine. Katherine wrote all previous best-selling editions, including Macromedia Flash 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide. 

Customer Reviews

Great logical guide to understanding Flash CS3!
Although slow to start with (as it starts by explaining all the nuances with how to draw etc) it is well worth sticking with it as it has a very logical build up of Flash functionality and makes understanding how Flash builds animations etc a lot easier than I have seen in other guides. I have to admit I am more of a try by example learner but sticking with this book has enabled me very quickly to understand Flash, expand my knowledge a great deal and I can now understand why it does what it does, making building animation a whole lot easier and more straight forward.

Needless to say I've already ordered the advanced Visual Quick Start Guide! If you want to understand Flash CS3 then this book'll do that for you, well you need to read it but you know what I mean!

A great guide to really understand Flash in some depth
I have to agree with Steve's review, you may not be up and creating projects as fast with this guide as some others but you really understand what's going on and why by the time that you are. Excellent if you have the patience and well worth it.

Once you start developing your own projects this in-depth knowledge really helps to speed things up.

Close to Useles
Having read many a computer book in my time I know what works and what doesn't. This most certainly does not.

This goes down the unfortunately familar route of being a dull and pointless description of every button, every menu item, and every combo box item on every dialog in the program, bit by bit. This is essentially just a reference book - all of the information is available much more quickly by simply pressing F1.

If you are new to Flash then what you need is a set of small projects - making a simple animation, making a banner ad, making a portfolio loaded from XML, a simple game etc etc. By having small projects like these one learns how the tools are used together to create a sensible real-life Flash project. Instead we have a clinical set of instructions on how to use the pen tool for example.

If you have every used any image maniplation software before, you probably don't need chapters of information on fill tools, bezier curves etc. You need to know how Flash works as a whole - how to use these tools in real life projects along with the unique features that Flash offers, such as ActionScript.

To anyone considering buying this book I would strongly recommend against it. Use the built in F1 help - this book offers very little over that.