Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Flash CS3 Professional in 24 Hours

Phillip Kerman

24 Proven One-hour Lessons

In just 24 lessons of one hour or less, you will be able to create dynamic animations using Adobe® Flash® CS3 Professional. Using a straightforward, step-by-step approach, each lesson builds on the previous ones, enabling you to learn the essentials of Flash from the ground up.

Step-by-step instructions carefully walk you through the most common Flash tasks.

Quizzes and Exercises at the end of each chapter help you test your knowledge.

By the Way notes present interesting information related to the discussion.

Did You Know? tips offer advice or show you easier ways to do something.

Watch Out! cautions alert you to possible problems, and give you advice on how to avoid them.

Learn how to…

o       Create, optimize, and export dynamic animated movies for the Web, disk, or CD

o       Integrate Flash animations with static HTML pages

o       Use Flash’s vector graphics tools, including filters and blends, to create drawings and animations

o       Use digital video in Flash movies

o       Animate using time-tested techniques and Flash’s special “tweening” features

o       Create powerful, interactive movies using the basics of ActionScript

o       Design Button, Graphic, and Movie Clip symbols and use them over and over without increasing file size

o       Import existing graphics from Illustrator® and Photoshop®

Phillip Kerman is an internationally recognized expert on the use of the Web and multimedia for training and entertainment. He frequently presents at Flash user conferences and has taught Flash and other authoring tools in workshops around the world.

Register your book at www.samspublishing.com/register  for convenient access to downloads, updates, and corrections as they become available.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

Solid Introductory Text - 2008-05-12
Reviewer Rating:
Starting off with Flash CS3, I watched all the video tutorials available freely from Adobe. These are quite good, but they also tend to assume you already know Flash- either from a previous version or from the help tutorials (which aren't so hot). In most cases, they already have everything set up and ready to go, and you have no idea how they even got to the starting point. Additionally, the coverage of the basic functionality of the stage, objects, and instances is very brief and not too thorough. The biggest problem with these tutorials is that it's very cumbersome to follow along with them without hitting the pause button every 10 seconds, since the folks doing them obviously are experts with the Flash interface and just plow through their examples at breakneck speed.

This Sam's book does a really good job of filling in those important parts, and does it in a step-by-step approach that lets you go at your own pace. It assumes absolutely NO prior knowledge of ActionScript or Flash, so those coming in cold will have no problems. Each chapter (or 'hour') is well-written and can be taken stand-alone if the reader is already familiar with some topics. Each exercise walks you through from the very beginning, and most don't depend on a previous one. The coverage is quite basic- by the end, you'll be able to do such things as import video, make simple interactive movies, do basic scripting and animation, and deploy it to a website. For more advanced things, you'll need other resources (of which there are- quite literally- tons of books available) but after reading this you'll have a very solid foundation to build from. From there you can do simple projects and can decide what (if anything) you would care to learn more about.

In my opinion, the sections on ActionScript are explained quite well, though admittedly I'm a very experienced programmer that had no problems understanding the syntax. Those who have no programming experience might find it a bit tougher; for those that want to learn this and care a great deal about it, there are whole books dedicated just to learning ActionScript (e.g. Learning ActionScript 3.0 by Shupe and Rosser). The only other possible complaint I could foresee about this text is that some of the chapters will take you substantially more than an hour to finish, unless you're either already familiar with Flash or are a really fast reader.

Senior citizen (retired teacher) says book is excellent - 2008-08-08
Reviewer Rating:
I am a retired senior citizen, taught high school and college some years back, owned a small software consulting company and was in the aerospace industry in the 1960's. Been in the computer field one way or another full time since 1964. Thought it may be fun to learn Flash CS3 Professional on my own to enhance designing lite web sites I manage. Purchased Phllip Kerman's book. It is pleasant to read, easy to follow yet technically pulls you right in. This is a perfect book to learn Flash CS3 Professional. Look no further - a self-instructing text can hardly get any better. If I were back teaching in the classroom, I would use this as my textbook of choice!

The Opposite of Flash? - 2008-09-14
Reviewer Rating:
Positives:
- Simple examples, "baby's first Adobe app" type of stuff.
- Plenty of focus on the Flash UI; you'll know what all the important knobs and dials are for.
- Interesting sidebars explaining complex topics like registration vs. transformation points.

Cons:
- Simple examples. If you've used any Adobe app, you'll be yawning for the first 6 "hours".
- The more lengthy examples are difficult to follow as several steps are combined into one step. E.g. "3) Do X, Y, Z, A, B." which makes following quite difficult as you glance up at Flash and back down to the book, you lose your place within the individual step.
- Examples do little to inspire. I'm halfway through the book and yawning. Right-click around the web and you'll see "About Adobe Flash Player 9..." on some really compelling presentations, both interactive and otherwise. I have to wonder if they're using the same Flash this book is teaching.
- Figures frequently not on the same page, further complicating following of the examples.

A solid 3 stars for me. Not terrific, not too bad. Would recommend for some (Adobe newbies) and not for others (creative suite pros looking to add another Adobe app notch to their belts).

Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Flash CS3 Professional in 24 Hours - 2009-09-07
Reviewer Rating:
Fantastic step by step do it yourself flash introduction guide. Also a great refresher for those who may have been away from flash awhile or those with outdated software.

Just Buy It - 2009-07-27
Reviewer Rating:
I didn't know anything about Flash. This walked me right into it. There is enough information to make you shine. Twenty Four hours is a little shy of reality. You will spend time here. It's fun, it's easy.

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