this book has its good points and bad but it was poorly poorly written and poorly organised. the classes that can be downloaded from the companion site are probably worth the price of the book as an intro to OOP but the explanations and execution in the book are poor.

The entire book supposedly leads to a culmination of the sample project coming together at the end so that the reader can learn how to tie all of the lessons together in a complex flash project...a point they seemed to completely forget when they got there

Flash Application Design Solutions was recommended to me by a co-worker of mine when I started learning OOP. I currently work at Avenue A | Razorfish in the Chicago office where we create sites such as Postopia [...]. In an ironic occurrence, it turns out that Craig Bryant, one of the authors of this book, was the person who set up the original framework for the Postopia site. I've met Craig only once when he and Ka Wai made a presentation (a really cool one, at that) at the Apple store on Michigan Avenue. They definitely know what they are talking about and this book is no exception.

I was eager to get started here after I had already realized the basic building blocks of OOP and wanted to get a bit more of an edge on setting up my projects. The book didn't disappoint as it gave me at least two very valuable classes that I still use to this day. The UIObject class is now the core building block of any navigation system I build and the (what I named) Broadcaster class (that is essentially the same as the EventBroadcaster in this book) is just about the best way to communicate between classes.

Chapter three is a great introduction into extending basic frameworks. Each and every chapter has a great introduction on what is an issue in the work you're about to tackle. Ka Wai and Craig then tell you how these issues can be improved and finally we go on to improve the issues to see exactly how much of a difference their process makes in developing your own solutions in the future.

Chapter six has a fair warning by the authors that it is a bit long winded and is relatively hard to get through unless you are going through and following the source, but it uncovers a really neat system of inventory views and selection devices. I'm normally not a huge fan of building one large application throughout a technical book, but its almost necessary to show how to extend the core and your own classes and build up the concepts from start to finish.

For anyone who has already read the Object Oriented Programming for Flash 8 title and is looking for a bit more on OOP, I'd definitely recommend this book as a companion. It'll help you get through that gray phase where you're now familiar with OOP concepts but you're not familiar enough to know how to practically apply them to your own projects.

This book is fantastic. It brings to the Flash community a real discussion of the oft-misunderstood "usability" that so many Flash applications lack. Books like this, and the work that it inspires are critical to helping Flash mature as a serious application development platform, rather than creating simplistic little "applets" and simple web commercials.

The authors here deftly weave a compelling tale around the actual pieces of usability and functionality that make up application development in general, and tie it all back together with Flash as the development platform. Some great books exist out there that teach about usability and functionality design (Cooper's "About Face", et al), but this is the first that truly brings that sort of learning in an instantly applicable way to the Flash development community.

Highly recommended.