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Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Bible

Book Review
Monday 9 March 2009.
 

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Bible
$49.99 / £33.99
Robert Reinhardt, Snow Dowd
Wiley
ISBN: 978-0-470-37918-9
1224 pages

When a book calls itself a ‘Bible’ you can bet it’s going to be a pretty big one. The ‘Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Bible’ is certainly that: it contains around 1,200 pages and there is not much in the way of padding. Moreover, it is fairly sparsely illustrated and the font is quite small. As a result, you get a heck of a lot of words for your money!

I have to be honest and admit to the fact that I find the sheer size of this book quite intimidating. The idea of starting at page one and diligently reading my way through to page 1,135 (which is where the Index begins) is a non-starter. Thankfully, this is not a book that demands to be read in sequence. It is more a pick’n’mix book - one that you can dip into when you need information or a tutorial on a specific subject.

If you are completely new to the Flash IDE (supplied as part of Adobe’s ‘CS4’ suite of tools) you may want to start right at the beginning. Here you will find a section describing the technology of Flash and how it fits into other web technologies such as HTML and JavaScript; then you can move onto the next section describing the tools available in the Flash IDE. If, on the other hand, you are an experienced Flash user, you can skip all the introductory stuff and move straight on to chapters on specific subjects such as ‘Applying Filters, Blends, Guides and Masks’, ‘Character Animation Techniques’ or the fairly extensive sections on programming Flash using the ActionScript language.

The later chapters will take you well beyond the basics of Flash. There are, for example, some fairly detailed tutorials showing how to control an animation using ActionScript, create a moderately complex ‘Hangman’ game and build your own custom components. All the source code is provided on a CD supplied with the book.

In spite of its great length, this book has one major omission. As with many books devoted to Flash and ActionScript, the ‘Flash CS4 Professional Bible’ has next to nothing to say on the subject of Flex. I must admit that I find this curious. Flex is Adobe’s application development framework and it is a superset of the Flash class libraries. While Flex is mentioned briefly in the text this is so brief that it doesn’t even merit an entry in the index. It is true that many Flash developers don’t use Flex and if you only ever use the ‘Flash CS4’ IDE, you may never need to delve into Flex. Nevertheless, I think that, at the very least, a chapter on creating Flex components using Flash CS4 (in addition the the ’Flash components’ which are described) would not have gone amiss in such a weighty tome as this.

Apart from that one omission, this book offers a pretty comprehensive guide to Flash development using the Flash CS4 IDE.

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Forum

  • Adobe Flash CS4 Professional Bible
    11 December 2009

    The biggest omission was AIR.


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