This is a great book I can tell, but...as a newbee to Flash 4, I felt that their approach meant well but turned into confusion as I progressed through the book. A lot of times I found them trying to teach me about a certain aspect of Flash before I even learned the basics of how to get to that certain point. Like trying to teach me how to change a movie clip into an animation before I even learned how to really create a movie clip or the basics of animation. I felt that the order of the chapters should have been reversed..How the timeline works and animation isn't even covered until Chapter 10....and being very anxious to learn this program, I found myself getting aggravated wanting to get to the more meaty parts of the program.

Give me a good understanding about the timeline and frames, keyframes, scenes and animation first to give me the basic knowledge of how Flash works, then teach me drawing techniques and gradients and creating and tracing bitmaps and so forth which all comes first in the book. The CD-ROM is a terrific idea, but each tutorial should have been more from the ground up...they show you how to do something but again don't show you how to get to that point on your own....most of the tutorials start off with set-up work already done and you just adding on to what they already created. If you have a descent handle on Flash basics already this is definetly a book for you to enhance your learning...if you're completely new to Flash I have a feeling you may end up frustrated and confused like I am...I'm going to give the Flash 4 Visual Quickstart a try, then come back to this book once I have a descent knowledge of the basics.......

This book is an excellent resource for learning and usingFlash! Three of my friends have used this book for learning it aswell! It gives comprehensive coverage of _all_ the commands and functions of Flash, including drawing tools, the menubar, and the Actionscript functions.

The best way to use this book is to go through the tutorials on the CD (which are immensely helpful) as you read along. In this way, it feels like you're actually being taught by someone! Great job!

The only qualm I have with F4CWA is, while every aspect of the Actionscript language is covered, and it gives a practical usage for each, I find it difficult to create some advanced effects. For instance, I download numerous .fla files on such sites as Flashkit.com which feature Actionscript. But I read the actual Actionscript though, I find that I'm lost, and am thinking, "How did they do this! "

Despite this, I still feel that this book is an excellent tutorial and reference to all Flash developers. Although this is the only Flash book I have, I have read through numerous other reviews on Amazon.com that complain about no Actionscript section at all! Therefore, I commend Derek Franklin and Brooks Patton for putting together such a useful and comprehensive book!

Highly recommended!

I found this book to be an excellent resource for using this software the way it was intended to be used. It's a rare thing to find useful documentaion that comes with a product and describes how to use the procuct to it's fullest. Flash 4 is no exception! The software does so much, but if you were to judge it's potential based on the manual that comes with it, you'd think it was half the product that it really is. Also, it's tough to find any ONE third party book that EVRYONE is happy with. Everyone has a different learning style that works for them. Some of us learn by reading, others by seeing, and others by doing. This book is designed to take the reader (or learner) by the hand and walk them through the most fundamental aspects of the product. Lots of us like to look through a table of contents, see the subject we're after, jump right to that page, and expect things to be comprehensible. Not so true with this book. If you're like me, you'll learn best with this book if you start from page 1, have patience, and read through it chapter by chapter. DO THE EXAMPLES, watch the movies on the CD, study them, and apply what you just learned to your own projects. The product is quite complex and does some fantastic things. There's no quick and easy answers to blow you through all that Flash 4 has to offer. But the authors of this book seem to understand this and present it in such a way as though you were taking a course on the subject. No instructor is going to start teaching in week 12, what ought to be taught in week 3. Stick with them, try not to jump ahead, and when you're finished, you'll have an extremely solid grasp of the software (much more so than if you had picked up a "quiky" book). I now have four books on Flash 4 and have read all of them cover to cover (and some more than once). This book, by far, takes the cake!