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!

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.

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.

This is a great book, although a couple of the ActionScript codes did not work the way that he wrote them, Flash was able to get me through. It is easy to follow, and an easy study. I am sure that there will be more that I get later to flesh out anything that I can't figure out on my own, but on a whole when you finish this book, you will be very comfortable with Flash CS3.

This is a great book for beginnings but it was too easy for me. I am terrible at buying books.

I was looking for a book that could make actionscript comprehensible to designers who have some technical abilities beyond design - especially a book that could explain or deconstruct websites that use scrolling windows, draggable windows transition in one flash section AFTER another sections transitions out, implementing preloaders in the loading process or unloading process, listeners, flare effects(which I love), etc.,

I really wish someone would write a book around a relatively sophisticated website and SLOWLY build up the prerequisite concepts necessary to understand the code behind the website.

All the best,
G.L.