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Author: Fred Gerantabee and the Aquent Graphics Institute Creative Team

Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Edition: First - September 2007

ISBN 10: 0-596-51058-6

ISBN 13: 9780596510589

Pages: 456

Price: $44.99 US, £27.99 UK

There's something on the back of this book that amuses me; amongst the list of selling points detailed there is "15 self-paced lessons. Work at your own speed." As opposed to books that what? Catch fire if you're too slow? Won't allow you to turn the page until it's darn well good and ready? By their very nature, don't all books allow you to work at your own speed?

Whatever the marketing group at O'Reilly meant by that, they could've come up with something better; there are dozens of reasons someone learning Flash CS3 should consider owning Dynamic Learning: Flash CS3. My top reason, however, may differ from yours. As I mentioned in my review of Dynamic Learning: Photoshop CS3, I prefer the "learning by example" process. It's much easier for me to retain procedures if I have to work through them, not just read about them. The books in the Dynamic Learning series provide you with what people like to call "real world projects." I have yet to be able to directly apply any of these projects to my real world, but so be it. The point is that Dynamic Learning: Flash CS3 Professional presents the reader with projects, the tools and files necessary to build the project and the instructions to complete the project. After working through a few of these projects, you should be comfortable enough with Flash to break out on your own.

That's the point, however, where the books in the Dynamic Learning series lose their usefullness; they're not good for reference. Although you can certainly bounce from lesson to lesson, you're better off working your way through the entire book, learning what you can, then setting it aside for books that are better at helping you refresh your skills or pick up new ones.

The lessons you will be learning in this book are:

• Starting Up
• Lesson 1: What's New in Adobe Flash CS3?
• Lesson 2: Flash CS3 Jumpstart
• Lesson 3: Getting Started with the Drawing Tools
• Lesson 4: Modifying and Transforming Graphics
• Lesson 5: Using Symbols and the Library
• Lesson 6: Creating Basic Animation
• Lesson 7: Diving Deeper into Animation
• Lesson 8: Customizing Your Workflow
• Lesson 9: Working with Imported Files
• Lesson 10: Introducing ActionScript
• Lesson 11: Creating Button Symbols
• Lesson 12: Adding Sound to Your Movies
• Lesson 13: Introducing Movie Clips
• Lesson 14: Working with Video
• Lesson 15: Delivering Your Final Movie

For details of the subcategories, you can visit the O'Reilly website. As you can see, Dynaminc Learning: Flash CS3 Professional focuses mainly on Flash's drawing tools, working with graphics, animating, and creating movies. If this is what you want, great, but I would've liked to have seen more lessons in basic, but common Flash capabilities such as creating pop-up menu navigation elements for web pages, or even something as basic as photo slideshows.

As for presentation, Dynaminc Learning: Flash CS3 Professional is very well laid out. The copious color screen captures do a great job of letting you know what you should be seeing, and there's a fair trade-off between Mac OS X and Widnows images. Each lesson begins with a description of what you'll be doing, what you'll need, and what you should have already done, and each lesson ends with a question and answer review. Throughout the book, certain bits of information and further explanations are pulled into sidebars to make sure you don't miss anything important.

Perhaps the most helpful element, however, isn't actually part of the book itself. The Dynaminc Learning: Flash CS3 Professional DVD comes with video tutorials that show you exactly what you'll be doing in each lesson. The book reminds you at the beginning of every lesson that it would be helpful to watch these videos, and that's true. It's like having an actual instructor to help explain things, thereby serving up three methods of lesson reinforcement: watching, reading and doing.

Fred Gerantabee's writing style is very clean and straightforward. He's not as engaging as some other O'Reilly authors I've read, but that can probably be attributed to the tone of this series, which is professional, clean and unintimidating.

Experienced Flash users will find little use for this book, unless one of the lessons just happens to coincide with a specific need. However, the book is marketing at new users, and it will be very useful to them...once. After that, because it can't really be used as a reference, Flash users will have to spend the money to move up to a book at the next level.

Hopefully, that book will let you work at your own speed, as well.