This practical, nuts-and-bolts toolkit puts theory into practice with ready-made answers to common Flash development questions. It's the perfect resource for Flash developers, as well as designers who are ready to start doing development work.

Flash 8 Cookbook offers quick look-up (and cross-referenced) recipes in four main categories:

• Creating Flash Content

• Building Interactive Flash Interfaces

• Adding Multimedia and Data

• Planning Flash Projects

Using O'Reilly's popular Problem/Solution/Discussion Cookbook format, this book offers 280 standalone recipes that include a brief explanation of how and why the solution works, so you can adapt it to similar situations you may run across in the future. For people who say, "I understand everything in theory, but I don't know where to start in practice," this book offers ready-to-use answers to real-world problems.

Joey Lott is the author of ActionScript Cookbook (O'Reilly) and co-author of Flash MX 2004 ActionScript Bible (Wiley). He's a leading speaker and consultant in the Flash development community.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 9 Ratings

I should have listened.... Very basic! - 2006-09-19
Reviewer Rating:
This is a book for beginners, not even intemmediate level readers. If you are familiar with any other design software like Illustrator, Photoshop, CorelDraw, etc. you will find that much of this book is useless since you already know it! This is a perfect exapmple, quoting the book:

"1.1 Drawing Straight lines

Problem: you want to create a straight line segment or a shape made out of multiple straight line segments.

Solution
Use the line tool[...], the pen tool[...] or the pencil tool."

This is by no means a "cookbook" and I'm very disappointed with O'Reilly being the publisher, since most of the time their books are great.

The book probably focuses on REAL ACTIONSCRIPTING up to 15% its entire content!

Only consider it if you never worked with a design application in your whole life and don't have the time or patience to read more than 2-page long chapters.

Cooking with Flash 8?? - 2007-02-14
Reviewer Rating:
Flash 8 Cookbook
Joey Lott ISBN: 0-596102402

Cooking with Flash 8??

Reading the Flash 8 Cookbook is a painful experience considering you pay $44.95 for it. If you need answers to real-world problems don't look here. This book is a semi-helpful reference guide for those designers who are just beginning to branch out into Action Script. They try to make everything in the book very easy for you to the point that some of the chapters talk down to the reader.

The meatiest information is concentrated from page 200-340 of an almost 500 page book. Some of the information in this section is about fading movie clips in and out, the key word "this", working with Java Script in Flash, and adding event listeners.

This book features one of the best explanations I have seen on how to create a listener object and add an event listener on page 346. They break all the code down there with samples.

A bonus to reading this book is that you can download a number of great low file size components written by Joey Lott . Some of the unique components are the form controller, slide show, and window controller.

This book even introduces you to 3d Max and how to use it in conjunction with Flash. There is info on video and mobile but, surprisingly no chapter on Office Yoga for the Flash Action Scripter. They lumped together a number of topics that could have individually comprised a number of 500 -1000 page books.

I think too many cooks spoiled the Action Script in this case. I consider this to be an easy fast read. Great to take to the gym or the beach. If you had to buy just one book on Flash 8, this wouldn't be the one you would choose.

Start Cookin with this one - 2007-03-28
Reviewer Rating:

I am not keen on any book that has Cookbook in the title. This book however is more of a Hanes manual for your old Volvo 240. You will have lots of shop spills (coffee not oil) and dog eared pages on this when you finally move on to a future version of flash. Even then this will become a great tool.

The book has four main solution sections: creating content, building interactive interafaces, using projects (I never get around to actually doing that!) and adding multimedia and data.

O'Reilly put a lot into this book, with a load of solutions, with the if, how, why and here you go.

Best if your up to speed and know your way around Flash well. For me, its a matter of understanding and implementing solutions as I encounter them. "Damn, how do I best deal with that problem? - Dunno? Read the book".

Short and too the point, you will need this if your a professional - either from the design side or the programming side of Flash. Not much use to students, though educators should read it through and get up to speed to increase the amount of knowledgeable students coming out of courses (enough of the bouncing balls already).

Awesome! - 2009-07-06
Reviewer Rating:
Thanks guys for a great buy from the other side of the World...you guys rock!

Flash Questions Answered Directly - 2009-02-27
Reviewer Rating:
This is an excellent book for anybody who doesn't want to dig around entire chapters looking for an answer to a simple question about how to do something in Flash 8.

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