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Thank goodness people are finally starting to get Flash right. As with most technologies, when Flash first started to gain in popularity, it seemed most developers could find nothing more to do with it than show off what they could do with it. What we ended up with were a bunch horribly designed websites that either didn't work or that you wish didn't work. For three years, I think the only decent use of Flash I saw was Duran Duran's "Someone Else Not Me" video, which I wish I could find somewhere again.

These days, though, developers have settled down a bit and are using Flash in proper and interesting ways. Becoming a web developer or animator without having a strong knowledge of Flash makes about as much sense as racing in the Tour de France without a strong knowledge of how to beat steroid testing. And so, here are three books from O'Reilly to help you get up to speed.

Title: Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity

Author: Rich Shupe and Robert Hoekman, Jr.

Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Edition: First - March 2006

ISBN: 0-596-10137-6

Pages: 460

Price: $34.99 USD, £24.99 GBP

First off, you should know that Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity comes with a CD. What a rare thing these days, considering most books prefer to just let you download what you need. I'm not sure getting that CD is worth a higher price now that broadband is so readily available, but there you go.

The CD is there because this book—as the title states—is all about projects. I've long been a fan of this approach, as it's much easier for me to learn through execution as opposed to instruction alone. I can read books and sit through seminars that regurgitate manuals, but that doesn't do much good when you sit me down in front of a blank canvas. Give me a project with pieces ready and tell me how to put them together, however, and suddenly I'm learning.

The chapters in this book are aligned in an obvious manner, giving you the basics up front (indeed, the first section of the first chapter is titled "Drawing Your First Box"), then letting you practice them in more complex projects as you progress. It's therefore recommended that you don't skip around in this book, but follow it from start to finish, hitting each of the following chapters:

1. Getting Started, Right Out of the Box
2. Creating Quickly: Customizing Your Workspace
3. Your First Animation
4. Buttons and Interactivity
5. Working with Graphics
6. Movie Clips and Interactivity
7. More Animation Techniques
8. Using Sound
9. Using Video
10. Compositing and Bitmap Effects
11. Working with Text
12. Loading Assets on the Fly
13. e-Learning with Flash
14. Flash for CD-ROM and Handhelds
15. Think Outside the Box
16. Appendix: Tips and Resources

It's all great for teaching Flash to beginners, and perhaps helping those with basic skills to brush up a bit and learn a few new things. There are some areas of Flash I'd like to see further explored, though, such as game development. It's maybe a bit too complex for such a book, but presenting new developers with a game they can put together would be a fun and rewarding experience, and would hopefully encourage further Flash game development.

If you're new to Flash and want to really dive right in to learn the program, forgot those QuickStart and Dummies guides, Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity will teach you most of what you need to know to get started, and you'll feel like you're accomplishing something all the while.

Title: Flash 8: The MIssing Manual

Author: Emily A. Vander Veer

Publisher: Pogue Press/O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Edition: First - March 2006

ISBN: 0-596-10223-2

Pages: 358

Price: $34.99 USD, £24.99 GBP

I've stated before that The Missing Manual series is my favorite line of instructional books. They're usually so well written and helpful that they almost make me happy that developers have quit including their own manuals in the box. Almost. Flash 8: The MIssing Manual is no exception.

This book is not meant to be used the same way as Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity. Although you can certainly read it from start to finish (beginners may want to), it's not necessary. Those with a bit of Flash experience under their belt will be comfortable bouncing from chapter to chapter, finding just what they need to solve a problem or get a new idea. In that manner, it's more useful in the long run than Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity, which will collect dust on your shelf after you've gone through it once. Flash 8: The MIssing Manual will be useful until...well, until Flash 9 comes out.

The greatest strength of any book with the Pogue Press stamp on it has been the writing, and E. A. Vander Veer is no exception. Seriously, with a name like that, could she have been anything but an author? I can't help but feel her name would looked better on a collection of poems, but if she prefers to give us Flash manuals, that's fine. Her writing is engaging, and it presents a wealth of information without ever inundating the reader. Her introduction is a bit long, but the book becomes useful in chapter one, which starts:

1. Part One: Creating a Flash Animation - Getting Around Flash
2. Creating Simple Drawings
3. Animating Your Drawings
4. Part Two: Advanced Drawing and Animation - Organizing Frames and Layers
5. Advanced Drawing and Coloring
6. Adding Special Effects
7. Reusable Flash: Symbols and Templates
8. Incorporating Non-Flash Media Files
9. Part Three: Adding Interactivity - Automating Flash with ActionScript
10. Controlling Animation
11. Interacting with Your Audience
12. Components for Interactivity
13. Part Four: Delivering Your Animation to its Audience - Testing and Debugging
14. Publishing and Exporting
15. Appendex - Installation and Help

As you can tell from the chapter listing, Flash 8: The MIssing Manual digs deeper than Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity, but it does so in a manner that's less conducive to learning. The chapter organization seems to have been determined by complexity, not by how Flash should actually be used. Because of that, you will frequently find yourself having to skip ahead or back a few chapters in order to get the info you need to finish any given project.

There are two things that bug me about this book. First, $34.99 is about $5.00 to $10.00 too expensive. Second, all of the screen captures are from Windows XP. I know that makes no difference in the grand scheme of things, but when I'm learning new software, I want to see things in print exactly as they look on my screen.

Title: Flash 8 Cookbook

Author: Joey Lott

Publisher: O'Reilly & Associates, Inc.

Edition: First - April 2006

ISBN: 0-596-10240-2

Pages: 534

Price: $44.99 USD, £31.99 GBP

And then there's Flash 8 Cookbook, which is an entirely different beast. If you're new to Flash, stay clear of this book for a while; it's not meant for you. If you've gotten through one of the others in this review, have created some projects and are ready to really get deep into Flash's capabilities, then here you go.

Flash 8 Cookbook does offer some basic instruction (the first lesson in chapter one is "Drawing Straight Lines"), but this book is all about building Flash animation and applications. It assumes a working knowledge of Flash, and although it does provide some simple, step by step instructions for specific tasks, they're not handled in the same hand-holding way as in Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity.

Still, Flash 8 Cookbook is able to go much deeper than the other two books because it doesn't waste time wandering around in the basics, as is indicated in the chapter structure below:

1. Drawing in Flash
2. Importing and Exporting Artwork
3. Structuring Movies and Laying Out Content
4. Creating Animation
5. Simulating 3D in Flash
6. Composing Images with Bitmaps and Masks
7. Working with Text Basics
8. Working with Dynamic Text
9. Adding Interactivity
10. Managing Playback
11. Managing Movie Clips
12. Creating Presentations and Slideshows
13. Building Flash Forms
14. Building Advanced Flash Forms
15. Customizing UI Components
16. Loading Images and Flash Content
17. Working with Sound
18. Working with Video
19. Using Data
20. Building Preloaders
21. Publishing Flash
22. Deploying Flash on Mobile Devices
23. Making Movies Accessible

Flash 8 Cookbook has fewer pages than Flash 8: The MIssing Manual, but covers more material. And if you're interested only in building Flash forms, for example, you can jump right to that area. Because the authors assume a working knowledge of Flash, you don't have to go through the book from start to finish, you can just hit what you want.

It should be noted, though, that although this book is targeting intermediate to advanced users, that doesn't mean the lessons are difficult to learn. The whole point is to allow you to create these solutions without having to rely too much on complicated Flash ActionScript programming. But the book does take its content seriously; the authors aren't interested in telling jokes or dropping pop culture references, they're interested in teaching you Flash. You'll close the book feeling as if you've just finished a college course, not attended an afternoon seminar.

In fact, the book very much has the look and feel of a college textbook: few screen captures, many snippets of code, and an awful lot of text. It could be a bit intimidating to a new Flash user, but would be a logical and valuable follow-up to either of the books covered above.
  

Regardless of whether you're new to Flash or looking to expand your skills, O'Reilly has a book for you. I feel that, of the three covered here, Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity is most effective in achieving its specific goal: getting you started in Flash by running you through specific projects. However, Flash 8: The Missing Manual and Flash 8 Cookbook probably both have longer shelf lives, as they can be used as resources for as long as Flash 8 is around. Regardless of how you use these books to become a Flash developer, you shouldn't need to go much further beyond them to get the job creating Duran Duran's next video.