There's a chance you might not be familiar with releases from SitePoint – you won't find their printed books on the shelves of many bookshops, as primarily they sell direct from their tremendous website.

So I have to admit I was pretty pleased when Matt Mickiewicz contacted us here at DMXzone and offered us the chance to carry some content from their latest release (Steven Grosvenor's, The Flash Anthology: Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript) and to let us review it.

To buy The Flash Anthology: Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript visit the SitePoint purchase page here >>

Book Review: The Flash Anthology Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript

There's a chance you might not be familiar with releases from SitePoint – you won't find their printed books on the shelves of many bookshops, as primarily they sell direct from their tremendous website. Having worked for a dead tree publisher in a previous job, I can understand the considerable benefits that this business model confers (it's not much fun in the office when the bookshops return thousands of copies of unsold books out of the blue).

Unfortunately, this lack of shelf presence might mean you might miss out on SitePoint releases, and that could be a shame, as SitePoint are getting a good reputation (check out what DMXzone contributor Rachel Andrew has to say about the PHP Anthology).

So I have to admit I was pretty pleased when Matt Mickiewicz contacted us here at DMXzone and offered us the chance to carry some content from their latest release (Steven Grosvenor's, The Flash Anthology: Cool Effects and Practical ActionScript) and to let us review it. While SitePoint make every effort to allow browsing via substantial chapter downloads, there's nothing like getting a book in your hands.

Book Details

Author: Steven Grosvenor

Publisher: SitePoint

ISBN: 0-9579218-7-X

Price: U.S. $39.95

General: Released July 2004, 455 pages

Table of Contents

1. Flash Essentials
2. Navigation Systems
3. Animation Effects
4. Text Effects
5. Sound Effects
6. Video Effects
7. Flash Forms
8. External Data
9. Debugging
10. Miscellaneous Effects

First Impressions

The book states that it is aimed at beginning to intermediate Flash users who might not necessarily have prior knowledge of ActionScript (or JavaScript), although does not pretend to teach programming to someone who has never encountered programming logic before. The layout is neat and the author's style relaxed and flowing.

As it says in the first chapter, the reader is expected to have the basic awareness of Flash that can be gained from reading the user manual and online tutorials. Personally I'm new to Flash, so I can't comment on the book with the eye of an experienced practitioner looking to see if best ActionScript practise has been employed at every step of the way, however I found the code accessible and clearly explained.

Most chapters begin with a little scene setting and, sometimes, a few words of caution about how to use the effects in a way that is considerate to the site viewer who doesn't want to be overloaded with effects. After that though it's straight into the examples.

The great strength of this book is the sheer number of examples provided. Starting with a basic illustration of the cool effect being demonstrated, many of the examples are delivered in basic form and then tweaked to enhance the behaviour. One example that caught my eye was a basic 'bouncing' text effect in Chapter 4 that was demonstrated and then extended so that, of the clips being played, the smallest (and visually 'lightest') clip was allowed to bounce more than the largest.

The examples though are not over extended – it is very easy to dip in and out of the book trying an example here and there. Of course the subject matter lends itself neatly to this approach and the author has created a very accessible volume.

It's hard to do justice to motion and sound effects on the printed page, but, fortunately, buying the book gives you access to a comprehensive code download that has all the files and background resources you need. You can view the completed animations, inspect the source code or just use the individual graphics, video and sound files to follow the examples in the book and, as you're encouraged, use them as a basis for further experimentation.

More Advanced Material

Chapter 8 moves onto discussing how to bring external data into your Flash application – at this point the solutions require server-side code to complete the solutions. To maintain the flow of the book server-side coding is not discussed in depth, rather the code needed is either bought in and described briefly or even demonstrated online (for those wishing to see the results without setting up their own web servers). Such an approach is entirely in keeping with the cookbook approach and leads the interested reader on to develop their knowledge if required (for instance at sites like DMXzone!)

Usefully the book includes a chapter on debugging – unfortunately it's always a dilemma where to put such chapters – early on in a book and they disrupt the flow, too late on and the reader who needs the information may already be frustrated. The good thing is that it's there.