I bought this book with the intention of learning more in depth use of actionscript with all of its wonders...Instead, I was bombarded with too much game design stuff. The table of contents was misleading and the focus of the book was useless for true web design.

There are many books out there for actionscript, I suggest any of the others.

This book is, along with Moock's Actionscript book for O'Reilly, the first really solid book covering programming in Flash 5. That includes good stuff on planning projects, code structuring, OOP, design, and XML much more in depth than any other Flash book I've seen. It is definately advanced, perhaps not to the point of some of the hardcore OOP coders on the Flash lists, but quite complex and more than enough to challenge most readers, which is good.

The projects are good and varied, and it seems like Friends of Ed has at last gotten someone to insure that coding styles are reasonably consistant throughout the book--other of their Flash books have been essentially collections of inconsistant and often incompatible articles. The usual suspects do show up (spaceship games and rotating 3D cubes), but presented with a level of detail and thoroughness totally absent in other books (short tutorial in matrix math anyone?)

The great chapters on Sound and XML are almost worth the price alone, but the standout chapter is called "Creativity in Practice" and covers invaluable stuff like: working in teams, interaction planning, prototyping, information architecture, even some usability. In other words, the stuff that professional designers do the 80% of the time they're not messing around with software. It's exciting to see these topics appear in what could have been just another coding book.

I won't dock it a star, but one qualm is that it doesn't come with a CD (again contrary to Kevin's review below). You have to download about 80Megs of files from the publishers site. Come on guys, if there's no CD at least knock a few bucks off the price. And even at high-speeds, that 80Meg download is kind of a pain.

Friends of Ed has been publishing great books on Macromedia Flash consistently in the recent months, and this one actually has some fundamental coverage like concept design and project structure then moved on to advance topics such as XML integration, Generator, etc. Basically a little bit of everything starting from the intermediate level Flash developers can use. My only complaints is the black and white printing, and no CD-Roms, but all the source files can be download from Friends of Ed's web site. Keep up the good work FOE!

This is an alright book i suppose. I had to read it for english class so you can understand my disgust with it. I found it very confusing and hard to understand....... Give it a go though for your own. I hate reading most books. Sad to say I find manuals more interesting thatn reading novels....Laugh as you may..o well

bob