I learned about this book from a review in the "Lands End" catalogue, of all places, and was thrilled by the quality and depth of the prints. I thereupon decided that I had to have the book. However, I was really disappointed. In my opinion, the prints reproduced in the book do not come anywhere close to the quality of the prints in the Lands End catalogue. The prints in the book look washed out and blurred, whereas Lands End prints were sharp, with plenty of detail.

Why is Amazon selling this book at full price

If there was not one line of prose in this book, the photographs would be more than worth the price of the book. We have grown up with images from the movies and television. These photographs portray the real American Indian. I found myself with a lense studying the detail of the clothing, beads and headdresses and eventually transported by the expresses. What were these people thinking as they poised? Are we the readers the ones that are really caught in time?

This book is awful! I know the fundamentals of programming in Flash and ASP.NET so regardless, if you are advanced or know the basics this book is still AWFUL!!! Trust me do not buy it! The Poll in the first chapter does not even work. I went to peachpress to find the updates for the book and the Poll sill will not work. The book constantly points to the CD and the CD is missing the files the chapter is pointing to. The Poll.XML on the CD does not match that in the book, I mean come on! This was all before I even got through the 1st chapter! ...

... I am sure that some of these examples worked, but only in the head of the author who authored the chapter. I am so upset about this one; ...

I couldn't agree more with the reviews that have already been posted. This book assumes WAY too much knowledge and leaves large chunks unexplained (like the #include .as files that don't even get a mention...)

The layout is sloppy and poorly thought out - eg they have 2 pages of code and THEN they describe what is happening in the previous 2 pages, requiring you to be costantly flicking back and forth. Simply repeating each line of code with its explanation would have made it so much easier to read (authors should check out "OOP with Actionscript" to see how it SHOULD be done).

The code that is included is full of stuff like

gotoAndPlay("whatever");//used to be gotoAndStop

making it obvious that the author hasn't even bothered to clean up their code before slapping it in the book. When covering a complicated topic like this, having comments that reveal the "mistakes" that the author made along the way is confusing, annoying and inexcusable (not to mention very revealing about the amount of effort [or lack thereof] that went into this book).

Save your money

cheers

I came into reading this book with very little Flash experience. All I'd done was simple timeline based flash movies. I chose to read this book to help get an understanding of Flash's capabilities and how to further the skills I had, enabling me to create dynamic content in my Flash movies.

I thought this book was unique in that it didn't get into the hows and whats of Flash, but straight into some very interesting example code. It also doesn't focus purely on Flash, but integrating flash with web application server products like ColdFusion and ASP.

While I'd never be able to create any of these examples on my own, it was quite cool being able to walk through each code example and see how everything works. Some of the Flash code was a bit hairy to follow, but they did attempt to explain it. Rather than learning what the code meant, I just read the comments stating what the code does and moved on. Unless you're experienced in flash, you won't be able to follow the code line for line. However, wading in example apps above your capabilities is a great place to learn.

Each chapter is a different example application, focusing on a dynamic backend. Some use ASP, some use ColdFusion, etc. So you can pick your middleware of choice and they'll be an example here for you where you can view both the Flash code, as well as the code it interfaces with to achieve dynamic content.

I wouldn't recommend this book as your soul source of Flash instruction, but it is a unique book rich with very usable example code. I didn't learn much Flash actionscript from this book, but I did come out of it with a good understanding of how Flash can be dynamic, using XML to communicate back and forth to your scripting language of choice. If that's what you're after, this might be a good book for you.