Sams Teach Yourself Adobe Flash CS3 Professional in 24 Hours

by Phillip Kerman

This is a best-selling Flash tutorial, revised to teach the latest version of Adobe Flash CS3 Professional through 24 one-hour lessons. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0672329379
• ISBN13: 9780672329371
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Sams
• Length: 547 Pages
• Weight: 1.97 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.0" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Senior citizen (retired teacher) says book is excellent

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!

Solid Introductory Text

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.

Very good tutorial for flash newbs

I'm a programmer who was tasked with integrating a flash UI in to our system. Knowing absolutely nothing about flash, I picked this book up based on the reviews here, and I wasn't disappointed. I went from zero to hero, in less than the allotted 24 hours :) Though the author really does start from the basics, the exercises are well though out and the steps were correct (unlike the abysmal tutorials that Flash ships with!) He also goes in to good detail about the theory of what you're doing, which was nice. For example, he has a good treatise on animation, and an excellent description of how the shape tweening mechanics actually work. I definitely recommend this book if you're completely new to flash and need to get up to speed pretty quickly.

Putting the Practical before the Pedagogic and Coming up a Winner

I e-mailed Phillip Kerman after reading his Sam's Flash 8 Professional book, and he wrote back and answered me right away. Afterwards, I went away from Flash to study Maya, and did not read Flash books anymore. After abandoning Maya (Did I say what a sucky business the movie business is? Not to mention the cost of keeping up with the hardware and software requirements as a lowly student before you even get to your first paying job - better have a rich uncle!), I am back at it with a vengeance, this time with a new version of Flash and ActionScript to learn, and with Phillip Kerman's Flash CS3 book planted firmly by my side. It would be great if all computer books were situational. For example, "I'm trying to do this and that, here's what I've done so far, and where I'm getting stuck. Now what?" Well, gee, we've anticipated this exact problem, and the answer is printed right there on page 187 - that exact problem you're having! Would that it be so, but as far as I know, they are not currently printing books on psychic paper as of yet. The next best thing? Really good examples of exercises and code that are useful, and not just learning for the sake of learning pedagogery, but something really practical. I mean, it might be nice to know how to capture an integer in ActionScript, return it to a parameter, and then spit it out in a trace statement, but how's that gonna help me show off my skills to a potential employer? Employers aren't impressed with manipulating integers as a rule. After I'd had enough of the online training, and read enough of the other Flash CS3 books, I decided to create my first major Flash project. I had problems making a link from one of my buttons, and also testing my pages on my hard drive before uploading them. Not only does Phillip's book come to the rescue solving these basic problems, but it is also so easy to look up direct solutions using the book's index. Also, his exercises are small, self-contained, easy ones to complete. As I began working on my Flash project and things started not to work, I went back to the approach of just getting one thing at a time right (as he shows in his book), and then to try integrating it into the larger project. It is much easier and less frustrating to get one thing to work properly, than to have to watch an entire Flash movie each time through just to see if last little part you added works or not. And if it doesn't, then what? Chunkify it, my friends, chunkify it! Put it into small chunks and get them to work right away. Worry about integrating them all later, when you know more about what you're doing. Of the other major Flash CS3 books on the market, and there really aren't that many right now (Classroom in a Book, Flash CS3 Professional on Demand, and the two Visual Quickstart Guide titles) I find Phillip Kerman's book the hands-down winner, based purely on his practical approach. Of course, it would be great to have an accomplished Flash teacher sitting there next

Solid learning material

Have used this book and Mr. Kerman's Flash 8 book to get a handle on Flash. Exercises do a good job of building the knowledge and skills you need to get going. You can move at a good pace but still get a handle on what you are up against if you want to get good at Flash. This is a cut above the typical tech product book. Highly recommend.