The best Flash book...

[Billydakid]

Hi there ppl,

I have to say that the best Flash book that I've come across is the Flash MX Designer's ActionScript Reference by Friends Of Ed (now owned by Apress).

Its a massive 1100 pages, over 400 fully functional .fla files, and has another 3 bonus chapters on the CD. Its intermediate level to advanced and with many of the Friends Of Ed books (and some Wrox titles) being 50% off the retail price I just had to get it.

I'm interested to know if anybody else has got this title and/or what your favourite Flash book and/or any web design/development titles are?

I did mean to have a look at Hillman Curtis's latest book last year: MTIV: Making the Invisible Visible, but never got around to it. Has anybody read it? If so was it any good?

Look forward to hearing from y'all.


Thanks.

(Ps. Thanks for the great response to my Matrix Revolutions topic, was a lot of fun!)

[gwx03]

I've got that book and I strongly recommend it. Friends of ed books are really productive, task oriented and easy! I've always been a fan of friends of ed and their books. Another book you should try is some friends of ed book about Flash effects and animations... I've forgot the name now though; quite some time ago and it was from the library.

[Rob]

I would be interested to know what flash book sirkent recommends?

What Flash books are in your collection Sirkent?

[courtjester]

Well, I dont know about you all, but I bought those CD's, that do hands on learning.... Doesn't teach actionscript though, thats why I can't do much with it. I DON'T reccomend the CD's. Ohh, I didnt buy them, they were a gift .

[Webforumz Staff]

I'll be honest with you.

I don't have any Flash books.

I learnt most of what I know regarding flash during versions 3 and 4, when there were few books available, especially during version 3. More importantly, the flash documentation was always sufficient for me to get a good understanding of the actionscript and concepts as they were just slowly introduced over the versions.

Another problem was that, from version to version, some important parts of the program changed that meant most books and information sources didn't get into complicated parts of the program and that's EXACTLY what you want a book to do! Some of the really complicated stuff I had to learn directly from other people or from downloaded source movies.

Downloading source movies is another biggie and I learnt a lot from that. A book can give examples of real world situations, but it rarely gives you the ACTUAL real world situations. You can go on flashkit or actionscript.org or anywhere and download source from real sites and it's very useful. You can pick apart code and animations and get a really good sense of how it was done.

So yeah, I've never had a book, so I can't recommend one!

[Webforumz Staff]

I'm with Sirkent. Reverse engineering sample files from sites is a great way to learn to do stuff. I started out back when Praystation was pushing the edge of actionscript with their source files.