Teach Yourself Visually Adobe Flash CS4 Professional

This is a beautiful book. No, really! It looks just great. Most books about computer software are black and white and filled with dull-looking text. This book is full colour and most pages have more space taken up by pictures than by words.

As a result, not only is it a pleasure to look at but it is also easy to dip into. You can just flip to the section you are interested in and follow the step-by-step guides. Each section is copiously illustrated with annotated screenshots which explain how to accomplish a variety of Flash design and development tasks use Adobe’s Flash IDE.

But while it looks nice, is it actually useful?

I guess that all depends on what sort of information you need. If you are an experienced Flash user this is not the book for you. It is principally aimed at newcomers and, accordingly, it starts at the very beginning with topics such as ‘Get to know the Flash user interface’, ‘Introducing the Flash drawing tools’, ‘Modifying and positioning artwork’ and ‘Working with text’.

The advantage of using annotated screenshots is that it avoids the frustrations which new users often encounter in tutorials. It is all too common for a book’s author to throw a spanner in the works by glossing over some crucial step with an instruction such as “Now create a new layer” in the assumption that the novice user will know what a layer is and how one can be created. In this ‘visual guide’, every operation is shown. When (for example) the author tells you to add a new layer, he does so in numbered steps:

1) Click the layer in the Timeline
2) Click Insert
3) Click Timeline
4) Click Layer

...and so on. And just in case you’ve forgotten where the Timeline is or how to find the Insert option, you only have to glance at the pictures alongside to see them in the Flash IDE.

The book covers all the fundamentals of the Flash CS4 IDE - including creating and animating graphics, some (admittedly very elementary) programming with ActionScript, adding sound and video and loading external elements at runtime.

The one thing it is missing, in my view, is an introductory tutorial (you know, something along the lines of ‘Your first ten minutes with Flash’). In fact, the book does not really have much in the way of ‘complete’ tutorials. Even though each topic is a sort of self-contained mini-tutorial there are no projects to take you from loading the IDE to running an animation with all the stuff you need to do in between.

Instead it deals with each activity one at a time - covering the generalities of drawing, animating, publishing and so forth. Really this is more of a reference work than a tutorial. If that is what you are looking for, and if you really don’t want to wade through a turgid, text-heavy tome, this book can be recommended. It is certainly one of the most colourful and user-friendly reference works I’ve ever seen!