Well i ordered this book thinking it would be a great source for all sorts of actionscript uses. Instead i found a book that had a few tutorials in it. Although they were very well written they were to specific and the book didnt cover enough. I would rather something a little more in-depth

After reading a number of customer reviews, I can only assume that the broad variations in ratings reflect different preferred learning methods among people. As for me, I think this book is terrific. The authors have painstakingly developed tutorials that stay focused on the subject-matter of each lesson. More importantly, lines of code are explained in detail, leaving little to the imagination.

This book is not for the impatient - I've seen smaller phone books. But if you're serious about learning Actionscript 2 and are willing to commit the time to work it from cover to cover, you'll add a strong marketable skill to your multimedia resume.

I purchased this book for a Flash course, and everyone in the class has done nothing but complain about the book. It jumps back and forth between lessons, leaves out some important scripting needed for the lessons, and is filled with typo's and general errors.

The lessons range from too easy, to far too complex. It will confuse a Flash Beginner, and bore an experienced User... and either way annoy anyone who reads it.

I have read this book, studied it, practised to the lessons and the outcome is that I still have very little knowledge of flash and how it works. The class has spoken to our professor, and he has written to the head office requesting a new Flash Text be used for the class.

This book is written in an incredibly easy-to-understand style. The chapters are filled with step-by-step tutorials and the included CD has all of the program files you'll need for each one. The tutorials explain exactly what each part of your code affects and why it works, so while it may take awhile to absorb everything, it has it all outlined for you.

The structure of the book and the order of chapters is a bit non-linear. It skips around from topic to topic, and it's not always clear how one chapter is building into another. This may not be the best for someone wanting to learn actionscript incredibly well, but is a wonderful way to become familiar with syntax, explore applications, and gain a strong working foundation for Flash studies.

Before reading this book, I was pissed off. All the Flash books out there show you how to create really cool effects and sometimes build rich applications while leaving you out in the dark clueless as to how the code was put together. Although the only shortcoming of this book is its failure to show a real application being assembled, is great for Flashers who are, like me, making their first steps towards acquiring actionScript. Besides showing good examples, it provides the LOGIC (Yes, I am shouting) behind why X has to be like this, and Y to be like that. Most of the examples seem to be game-related. I'd recommend this to a Flasher who considers himself/herself to be a bit intermediate. It can fit beginners in Flash too (beginners who already know how to paint, animate, you know the little things). Need more learn-by-example tutorials, check out www.actionscript.org. It is really worth the money though!

Am I missing something? Where are all these stars coming from? Only 50% of the time does this book address my questions. The book has a ton of information but is almost unusable for the average researcher. Be sure to review the book in detail before purchasing to verify that it has what you're looking for. The glossary is virtually useless. You'll spend a lot of time searching for your answers. Bad usability.

You finished Kerman's book (Teach Yourself Macromedia Flash MX 2004 in 24 Hours -- the best first book on Flash), and you're looking for your next step toward Flash mastery. You liked the approach of learning by example; of working with complete small projects that show how to use Flash features. And you're more of a programmer than an artist; what you want is more control over your animations, rather than more eye candy. Well, look no further; Derek Franklin and Jobe Makar have the book for you!

This book will show you how to do a lot of things with Actionscript, including drawing new objects, moving clips around the stage dynamically, playing sounds, working with data from databases, and bringing in sounds and images from external files. You get working examples of everything they show.

This is an updated version of the authors' earlier book, Macromedia Flash MX ActionScripting: Advanced Training from the Source. All the programs have been modified to be consistent with Flash MX 2004 programming style, especially including the use of typed variables. There is also an extensive chapter on working with components, completely updated for the 2.0 component architecture of Flash MX 2004. If you already have the earlier book, you will find a lot of repeated material here.

As a graphic designer, I have always been impressed with Flash's ability to create sophisticated graphics, animations and websites. The problem for most designers, however, is having to cross the inevitable bridge between design and programming. The bane of nearly all designers is having to come to grips with the fact that without Actionscript, your work becomes one-dimensional: neat looking animations, but limited interactivity. Learning Actionscript is the next step towards Flash mastery; and without it, you're cutting yourself short.

Granted, there have been a great number of textbooks, resources and tutorials on actionscript...but finding a resource or reference manual decent enough to teach you a technique you need to know--in language you can understand--is difficult at best.

Until now.

Derek's conversational writing style results in text that is easy to follow and highly informative. Using clear, practical examples, Derek demonstrates key topics such as functions, arrays and dynamically generated content. Finally, a resource that makes it a lot easier to digest and, more importantly, UNDERSTAND Actionscript as it can be used in real-world applications. Try getting that from O'Reilly's...

As an instructor (and also having poured through hundreds of pages of Flash content myself), I can say without hesitation that this book exceeded my expectations. To say that there's a lot to learn in & about Flash is putting it mildly. But Derek has done an incredible job of breaking down the process of working with and coding Actionscript, which made learning code fun!

Bottom line: easy to follow steps (including completed lesson files so you can go back and check your own work), thoughtful explanation of code, and practical examples make this book a "must have" for anyone wanting to dig deeper into Actionscript.

First the styl of book is great like previous book (Macromedia Flash MX ActionScripting: Advanced Training from the Source) which i have. I was little bit confused if i opened the new book and saw the same tutorials. If you have the Macromedia Flash MX ActionScripting: Advanced Training from the Source than buy rather book from other author to enhance your "tutorial library".
At the end:
I like the Derek Franklin books, but if I buy new book i expect new content, not remake of older book.
If will out newer book of Derek Franklin ( e.g. Macromedia Flash MX 2006 ActionScript: Training from the Source
by Derek Franklin ;) ) I will read choicely the reviews before I buy it.
I any case if You don't have the great previous (Macromedia Flash MX ActionScripting: Advanced Training from the Source), i say BUY IT!
P.S. Sorry for any grammatical errors, I am foreigner and until quite recently I am begann to study English.

I have found this a between bad and reasonable good book.
I have already a few years actionscript-experience and was looking for a book that could help me in the "whats new departement". Actually it has helped me to find out what is new in AS2.0 however the book is to slow for me (and I haven't done the actual lessons, I have only read it) What I mean is that when you have some actionscript experience I think you are better off buying another more advanced book (like object-oriented Actionscript) that helps in the "whats new departement" while you reading it without loosing time on endless explanations of things that speak for itself.

In this book there is one chapter on Object-oriented-programming (which by the way I found to be interesting). So again if you feel up to moving your programming to OOP than don't buy this book.

If you have no or very little experience with AS : buy it, its written for you!

but that book was awesome and great! it teaches KEY fundementals that helps me create the site i want..

so as for the guy who changed up the tutorials for himself before even completing the tutorial.. should try to do the tutorial to the 'T' 1st, and get the basics before going on to alter the project for his own..

the only problem i didnt like bout it was that it covered ASP and not PHP..

Derek Franklin and Jobe Makar have written the best introduction to Actionscript out there. As an instructor I have used this book as a course book for students from Boeing, high-end design shops, and other developers with very little knowledge of Actionscript. The authors use excellent visual examples and commentary to reinforce important Actionscript concepts. I also use this book a primer for preparing students for database driven Flash using Flash Remoting. I appreciate the 200 new pages content from this previous edition with updated examples. As an instructor and consultant, I am delighted to recommend this book.

If you're looking for a a book that teaches you all-inclusive how to program ActionScript2 resourcfully than that's the one you must have! I'm coming from the pearl/php/vb environment and it was a breeze working myself into the new Flash language.
I may sound a little too enthusiastic... but this one I can recommend without any reservation.
You're getting dirty hands from the beginning; every chapter tells you how to work with the source files on the CD to pull you thru. There are Examples for every aspect.
While some people do not recommend it as a reference... well, so do I. But it is obviously not ment to be one. For a good reference you mitght consider buying the one from O'Reilly.
Sorry... any grammatical errors in this comment are due to the fact that I'm Swiss.

This book contains a series of great tutorials on the most common ActionScript tasks you might encounter. It starts with the basics, so even the non-programmer should be able to get up to speed quickly. I also use it as a reference book sometimes, but I usually have to extract the info I need from one of the tutorials, making it hard to track down the one line of code I need. I usually use it by doing tutorials similar to projects I'm working on, so that I can immediately practic and apply what I've learned. The included CD is top-notch with all of the files you need for the tutorials and more. I highly recommend this book, although you might want to buy a reference book too (or just try the Flash help menu - it's vastly improved over previous versions).

In an attempt of cover "everything" the authors of this book did great disservice to his audience. I found the content to be much too broad-base while it's depth was much too shallow. As is usual with most computer-book "authors," Franklin and Makar jump around a bit and sometimes leaving the reader up in the air. It is intended to an intermediate audience yet it has chapters that are much too basic and chapters that are much too advanced. Further, I found many instances when the authors were making assumptions on the skills of the reader. It's not a bad book, but there's quite a bit of room to improve.

I'm not a beginner, so it's hard for me to judge if one can become proficient in ActionScripting through this book. But it has been a useful reference for me as one moving from ActionScript 1.0 to 2.0.

What I would like to highlight is that while the book in the introduction claims that it is useful for both the Standard and Professional version of Flash, I personally find that the user will gain more using the Professional version. A Standard version user may get pretty frustrated as early as the 1st chapter when they are asked to create a .as file, without being told that you can't open .as files in the Standard version. This is perhaps the greatest flaw in this otherwise decent book.

I really enjoyed reading this book and following its tutorials. Being a programmer with strong OOP background for more than ten years, I found the book very helpful in learning Flash MX 2004 actionscripting. It covers many important features of ActionScript 2.0 and shows how to apply those features to projects, including some techniques on testing/debugging your scripts. The tutorials are kept simple but interestingly enough to demonstrate the relevance to real-life projects. The text is written in plain english, allowing even non-native readers (such as me) to follow the text.

However, there are some downsides of this book (you can't have everything in a single book ;) ) that prevented me from giving this book a five star rating:

- the book basically is way too much focused on the procedural approach of actionscripting. Due to the very simple nature of the tutorials included in this book, it is fine to put functions here and there. Real-life projects however tend to become much more complex, and I doubt that reyling on functions (most of them put in a single frame) will do the job very well. So I had expected the second half of this book (after introducing OOP) to arrange the scripted functions into classes and showing how to employ OOP to keep your projects maintainable. Just calling methods on classes from within functions isn't very OOP-like.

- the new UI components of Flash MX 2004 are covered not very well. There's just one chapter dedicated to UI components and those are used only sporadically throughout the book. In particular, I missed tutorials on how to create UI components and a chapter on how to subclass UI components that come with Flash MX 2004.

Besides that, the book is worth the read if you are a ActionScript beginner (such as I am) and will definitely get you on the road to becoming an ActionScript expert. If you are already familiar with ActionScript 1.x then this book may contain not enough new "food" for you, so you better stick with the documentation provided by Macromedia. Knowledge of programming concepts certainly makies it easier to follow and understand the samples in this book. If you are totally new to (OOP) programming, you should read a good (OOP) programming book first before taking this course in ActionScript 2.0.

I bought this book for a flash course I am taking. I have been programming for over 8 years, and I still found this book extremely difficult to follow.

This book comes with a CD with several graphics, and the author takes you step by step on exercises to perform with those specific graphics. I didn't follow "exactly" what the author wanted me to implement with the his/her graphics on the CD the book comes with, but why should I have to?? I wanted to work towards implementing what I'm learning towards MY own site, not his/hers. I thought I could follow the book and see how to easily add animation, behaviors, drop down menus etc. I found that the author jumps totally off course from chapter to chapter, you find yourself flipping back to previous chapters all the time, trying to decipher what the author is trying to get across.

I just think this book flows very poorly. I would look at other books on Flash before purchasing this one.

I baught this book hoping that it would be an guide,overview and dictionary of AS2.0 in the same way that "Actionscript for Flash MX. The Definitive Guide" was for Flash MX.

After paying and reading this book from cover to cover, I was very dissapointed with it's depth. It doesn't even touch on extending current static classes, most of the examples are just excuses to use what you have just learned and don't really have any real world application and most of the content is more about the application than about the actionscript behind it.

I was hoping that this book would be an offset for Macromedia's hopeless documentation, but alas it wasn't. It's probably good for first time flash users, but I'll be waiting for something from Colin Mook now.

If you already have some experience with ActionScript this book won't teach you the fundamentals of AS 2.0. The examples are boring and the way they are programmed is rather poor. Don't expect to go through all the magic and efficiency of AS 2.0. The best you can get from this book is picking some intersting advices sometimes, but it's definetly not worth the price. The only piece of code beautifully written is the chat server class written by Makar, and you can easily download it on his website ;)

For years I labored to teach myself scripting of various kinds. As resources in that endeavor, the O'Reilly books were impenetrably dense and the "Dummies" books were so slight that I didn't feel like I was learning anything I could build on.

Then Flash came along, and in a couple of years Actionscript was added. I felt my way through some simple scripts, but still I couldn't cross the threshold into scripting anything particularly useful.

With this book, Derek Franklin and Jobe Makar have launched me across that threshold by helping me to learn Actionscript AND to understand it. By the time I had reached page 116 in this 764 page (the Target Paths chapter) I had already learned more about scripting from these pages than I had EVER learned from all the other books I've read on similar subjects.

I imagine that the only training sources better than this $45 book are the online courses which can run into the hundreds of dollars per course. As a layperson, if you want to learn Actionscript you would be well-advised to spend time and money on this book.

I'm a professional graphics programmer, most recently via Java applets. I tried to learn Flash 5, and dropped it because I couldn't see doing real simulators with it. But with MX 2004 and ActionScript 2.0, the programming model is finally to the point where I can get all the power of Flash animation and vector art, small downloads and excellent browser support & deployability, without sacrificing object-oriented programmability, plus gain outstanding server-side integration capabilities. Still, I was finding it a really steep climb up the learning curve with Flash MX 2004. I'm not the only one - I've spoken to other Java & OO programmers who despaired of the paradigm shift to Flash. But then I got this book. Now it all makes sense. Virtually every one of the 50+ beautifully designed and programmed examples gives a huge leg up on the learning curve. I've been programming for 25 years, and this is one of the best programming books I've ever read. If you're a programmer, and want to learn Flash, get THIS book. :)

Flash 2004 MX has some exciting new features that make it a dominant program and solution in the increasing popularity of today's web market. To grasp these awesome new features, you must learn Actionscript. "Can't I just find instruction and answers in Macromedia's help index?" Quite honestly, no, but there is a resource that will not only help you understand this powerful programming language, but also will guarantee that you learn them the right way: Derek Franklin's Actionscript book "Training from the Source" is one of the best books on the market b/c it goes beyond sharing a bunch of code; it helps you truly understand how to script. Derek's approach is creative, fun, and filled with so much stuff, you'll always find new methods and ways of writing scripts just based on the examples in this book. There's no other book that gives you so much in a simplistic and easy to understand way than this book. If you're new to Actionscripting, this book will build your confidence and give you the skills to become a seasoned scripter. If you're a seasoned verteran or wondering if you should purchase this book even though you have the previous version, the answer is a dramatic, yes. With Actionscript 2.0, Derek will show you how to make the transition from old scripting to the latest version, as well as help you learn the power behind Flash 7.I frequently refer to this book as a resource.

If your desire is to learn Flash's robust language and create dynamic websites, this book is a must.

Flash 2004 MX has some exciting new features that make it a dominant program and solution in the increasing popularity of today's web market. To grasp these awesome new features, you must learn Actionscript. "Can't I just find instruction and answers in Macromedia's help index?" Quite honestly, no, but there is a resource that will not only help you understand this powerful programming language, but also will guarantee that you learn them the right way: Derek Franklin's Actionscript book "Training from the Source" is one of the best books on the market b/c it goes beyond sharing a bunch of code; it helps you truly understand how to script. Derek's approach is creative, fun, and filled with so much stuff, you'll always find new methods and ways of writing scripts just based on the examples in this book. There's no other book that gives you so much in a simplistic easy to understand way than this book. If you're new to Actionscripting, this book will build your confidence. If you're a seasoned verteran or wondering if you should purchase this book even though you have the previous version, the answer is a dramatic, yes. With Actionscript 2.0, Derek will show you how to make the transition from old scripting to the latest version, as well as help you learn the power behind Flash 7.

If you desire is to learn Flash's robust language and create dynamic websites, this book is a must.

I have been working with Flash for some years now, and eveytime a new version comes out I buy a book that talks about the upgrades and new cool stuff etc.

Without a doubt this the the best training book I have read bar none. Each Chapter covers the subject indepth and in detail. The author goes step-by-step and explains every action and why it is done that way. Most books I have read are either heavy in theroy or heavy in the process (this step, next step), if you are an ActionScript novice or expert this book will give you the information you need.

If only I could find books like these in other software systems I work in.

I'll be the first to admit I'm too thick for programming. Sure, I can design stuff, but program? But Flash was just too enticing, too fabulously rich in potentials not to jump in with both feet. And Flash without Actionscript is fun, but it's not all that. You won't build much of a web site without AS. So with great trepidation I set forth to teach myself Actionscript, with about as much enthusiasm as I would for learning hieroglyphics, and with about as much chance for success.

This book has been great. I've got way more to learn, but the foundation has been perfect. That's my definition of a good instruction book: it teaches you won't you don't know and inspires you to learn more. Probably if you already knew AS to some degree, this book would be pretty tepid. And certainly, if you're not willing to stick with it, this book will frustrate you. Occasionally the authors skim over some stuff that is probably self-evident to all the but most thick-headed designers. I had to back up from time to time to re-familiarize myself with certain concepts; there's a lot of territory covered and the authors will step you through it, but they won't hold your hand. If you're on a Mac one lesson won't work (at least I couldn't get it to work), and you'll need access to a server with ASP capabilities for another, otherwise the execution is flawless.

Still, on balance, a perfect beginner and intermediate introduction to AS.

What can I say, this book was a joy to me. It goes into the depth and detail of ActionScripting that I've longed to see. Of course when it comes from Macromedia, what do you expect, right? I got this book and Flash MX 2004 Killer Tips and together they make a good combo, but the killer tips book seems geared more toward the novice while this book covers the very advanced stuff regarding AS 2.0 of course. This one gets my vote and I'm a very tough critic.

First of all, this is my first book review. I've been using flash for over 3 years now and enjoyed reading this book. Each chapter is specific about the subject it covers and gets to the facts quickly. The lessons are easy to follow and the excellent graphics supplied with the companion CD make completing the lessons a joy!

Note: currently the web service that is used as an example in the book is no longer being offered at XMethods.com and so though this doesn't work within the book, it is of no fault to the authors. I also had difficulty with 1 lesson using ASP as I couldn't get the supplied ASP code to update their Access database.

With that said, Franklin & Makar make learning ActionScript an enjoyable experience with the creative lessons and I would easily recommend this to my friends.

Let me say first of all I think that Derek Franklin has broken new ground in terms of how his content is delivered and the quality of materials he has produced. My career would not be the same without his knowledge and I depend on his books each day or whenever I have a project to complete. Pure and simple he is without a doubt a premiere Flash author. Anyone who thinks dfferently has not read one of his books or visited his site.
Derek, you keep up the fantastic work because people like me depend on masters like you to help them learn.
Good Job D

I have read the book "Flash MX Advanced training from the source (ISBN 0201770229)". That book is globally identical to this version. Only some minor modifications to the Actionscript 2.0 are made and chapters 19, 20 and 21 are new. For me the new book gets 1 star. Not only for that. Chapter 14 deals with dynamically creating textfields, and styling them with actionscript. Not mentioning the new css-features for Flash MX 2004 Pro.

But when you have not read the "MX-book", than this book is a 5-star! You will not only learn how to use actionscript, but also learn why.