This book consists of tutorials that you perform, which increase in difficulty as you progress. However, instead of teaching you Director and Lingo, and how to use them, this book just has you do mindless tutorials. Sure, it tries to explain a few things along the way, but for the most part, you just follow directions, and do the tutorials.

I learned a whole lot more about how to use Director and Lingo from Director 7 Demystified. It explained things in clear terms, and taught you how to USE the program, instead of just telling you what to do next for the tutorial. Demystified is also a vast reference for Director and Lingo, whereas once you go through the tutorials in this book, you will probably never come back to it.

If you are trying to learn Director, I would definitely go with Director 7 Demystified.

I think Director 7 and Lingo Authorized is good for beginners who know nothing about this application. The step by step tutorials does help me to feel and to remember all the basic functions. This is an okay book. However for those who want to go deeper into it as well as lingo, you ought to read Director 7 Demystified too since it has a bigger section on lingo script. Macromedia is famous for its support and learning site. The official documentation is also a very good source to learn, esp. their manual on the shockwave multiusers server. I cannot find much information on this server in most Director books.