By Jed Clampett

June 1, 2001

The New Masters of Flash is quite a hefty book with full color throughout. There is an impressive list of contributors to this volume, they are;

Yugo Nakamura, Tomasz Jankowsk, todd Purgason, Ivo Van de Grift, thevoid, Andries Odendall, Eric Jordan, Manuel Clement, Brendan Dawes, Tony Ke, Irene chan, Jayson Singe, cut-and-paste.com, Oliveier Besson, James Patrson, Vince Suriani, Tomato, Yasuto Suga and Joshua Davis.

Each of the authors provides an essay about design, discussing their influences and design vision, followed by a tutorial.

Something that this book has that no other book does (that I know of) is a topic map, its a grouping of chapters thematically and an explanation of how you can continue on a particular thread or topic by jumping to related chapters

This is not a "learn how to use Flash" book, if that is what you want, check out the Foundation Flash 5 book (my favorite for learning Flash). This book is for inspiration and learning. The tutorials assume an advanced level of experience. If you are looking for tons of Flash 5 ActionScript then this isn't it either. The ActionScript in this volume is for Flash 4.

What you will gain from this book is an insight into how the power designers think and how the convert an idea into a Flash presentation. You will learn some advanced techniques on how to build some flash componets. There are topics such as adding sound, an introduction to load/unload movies, the illusion of 3D, and many more.

This book is well illustrated in full color and is beautiful to look at and easy to use if you have a knowledge of Flash already.

The CD-ROM has great interview movies which you get to see some of the personal motivations and philosophies of many Flash gurus. All the tutorials however are not included.

Copyright 2001, Jed Clampett, All Rights Reserved