Vikki Dawson

March 1, 2000

FLASH 4 Web Animation f/x & Design starts out by explaining the newest capabilities of FLASH 4. They call it a snapshot, I call it an enticer. If I didn't have FLASH 4 before I had this book I would be first in line to get it tomorrow morning. However, nothing I read in the snapshot section was anything other than the truth about the newest capabilities of FLASH 4.

After detailing the new capabilities the author takes you through the drawing tools available in FLASH 4 to get you familiar with the interface and how things work. This is very important information necessary to follow the next chapters.

The book teaches some basic and some advanced techniques as well as giving tips and hints about things that work and things that don't. The tutorials are great and easy to follow.

Once you get past the basic and advanced drawing techniques, the book takes you through animation. It's what we all want, action. Again, the tutorials are easy to follow.

The next chapter takes you through the advanced animation and the actions. I was impressed with how much information was packed in this section. Although a small section of the book, it gives understandable information on topics that include Get URL, Drag Movie Clip, If Frame is Loaded, and more. It shows examples so you're not just reading the text, you're seeing the actual coding.

Flash 4 introduced a new scripting language called ActionScript. This scripting language allows you to create FLASH 4 movies with more interactive capabilities.  The chapter on ActionScript will give you enough information to get you going.

The author also takes you through some basics of using FLASH 4 with other Macromedia software including FreeHand, Fireworks 2 and Dreamweaver 2. 

Another very good chapter covers using text in FLASH 4 and discusses editable text fields, animating, reshaping, adding outlines, and filling text with bitmaps.

A very exciting chapter for me was the chapter on forms. Included in this chapter are the FS Commands, how to communicate between FLASH 4 and javascript. This chapter also covers exporting movies and other export options including importing and exporting Quick Time movies.

The last chapter takes you through publishing a movie and really covers a lot of territory with a great amount of information.

And finally the book includes three appendices that cover ASCII character values, features that were introduced in FLASH 3 and visual guide to FLASH 4, which if you need to find out about a feature quickly, it's the best place to start.

The book is well written, easy to understand and follow, and the index is quite comprehensive. I didn't have any trouble looking in the index and finding what I was looking for. This is a great book for the price. You can get this book at Coriolis and if you want to learn FLASH 4 it's one of the books to have. Between the book and the CD you can't go wrong.

Also included in it is a section that lists FLASH sites that teach you even more about FLASH 4. A good guide to have handy even after you've read it all and done all the tutorials.

Included with the book is a CD ROM that contains:

• 30 day full evaluation copy of FLASH4
• Shockwave 7.0.2 and Flash 4 players
• 30 day full evaluation copy of Dreamweaver 2.0
• 30 day full evaluation copy of Fireworks 2.0
• 30 day full evaluation copy of FreeHand 8
• 30 day full evaluation copy of Generator 2
• Tutorials by John Croteau
• Flash files for the tutorials included in the book
• And a game called VirtualBlox that will demonstrate some of the power of FLASH 4

$49.99 (US)

System Requirements

Windows 95/98/NT or Macintosh 7.5 or later
Intel Pentium 133 or equivalent Power Macintosh processor
32MB RAM for Windows (recommended) 16 required and 32MB RAM required for Macintosh
20MB disk space for FLASH 4 and about 100MB free disk space to install all of the evaluation software
CD ROM drive

Copyright 2000, Vikki Dawson, All Rights Reserved