what the hell? greasers? c'mon. it diminishes any credibility and realism this book had any chance of achieving. i can understand having a character use the word within the context of the story, but to use it in the book description . . . well, it's tasteless. like a bowl of caldo cooked with cardboard.

el paso, tx

This was a very good audio book. It is an entire story and not only about 1/4 of a book told like most audio books. This is not a very serious story, it is suitably for both adults and younger people.The only reason that I am only giving this three stars is because it is not a very serious story. I prefer adult horror novels. This is more of a short story for all ages. Kind of like a disney film. I did enjoy it however. It comes on three tapes and is six hours long.

I have been designing Web sites for years, and was a Network Engineer for years before that. This book is well written and talks about great examples, but it doesn't work. I know Flash. I know a bit about Flash Action Scripting, but I have not been able to get one single script to work correctly. You shouldn't have to read a second book just to get the one you bought to work right. Like someone else said, even the finished examples don't work right, so you can't look at that code to see what's wrong.
I expect much more than that from any book, and I would return this book if I still could. I spent too much time thinking I was doing something wrong to be able to return it now, though.
In summary, buy another book. You will probably be happier.

This book is decent...but leaves a lot to be desired. The cd that comes with the book includes source files to work on the different chapter projects...but it does not contain final versions of them....so you'd reason that they would be on the flashmxmagic website for download....that seems to have "magically" disappeared as well. Instead of rushing to publish this book so it would come out close to the release of Flash MX, the publishers should have made sure the website was up and that the cd contained final source files rather than demos of other macromedia software. This book is alright, but if you really want something intuitive, I'd recommend waiting until Phillip Kerman's Actionscripting in Flash comes out in July...or buying his book on Flash 5 actionscripting.

I've been using Flash since version 3 and remember buying this particular book for version 4. I buy this particular book because it has specific projects that I can implement now. It speeds up my development time. Do I tweak the code and break it so that I can learn more from it? YES Is this book for an absolute beginner in actionscript? NO This book assumes a certain level of knowledge. If you don't know actionscript and can't recognize the different constructs and where to put them then go find a different book that will teach you that aspect of actionscript. This book is for the pro who wants to work through some projects using MX to quickly get up to speed with AS in Flash MX. Its also for the learner who learns through working through projects. I'm a software trainer and believe me, lots of people learn via working through preexisting projects (I do). You still need to understand the Actionscript constructs before doing this but it complements that by showing you specific examples of actionscript use. Buy this book with another book that will teach you Actionscript like Moock's book or Sham Bhengal's book. Read them together or the AS book then this for specfic examples of implementing code.
Congrats, nicely written and to the point for me.

When I picked up this book I'll admit I had rather high hopes. It starts off strong, giving you alot of atmosphere, and then it gives you more atmosphere. And then it gives you more atmosphere. There isn't any real meat to this book. The character creation section is limited telling you that creating a Mafia character is pretty much like making a vampire minus the powers. And while there is several references to Vampire and Werewolf Mafia guys, there is not short bio's of any, like you'd find in a clan book. I was hoping that it would cover some other types of gangs, Yakuza, Tongs, ect. Instead it confined it's to the Mafia during it's heyday. Long story short. If you've seen The Godfather, Goodfellas, ect. you don't need this book. If you haven't seen these moves you'd have a better time watching the movies than reading this book.