This book is a descent resource of basic information; that is, if you can find it. That's the most frustrating thing about this book is that it suffers from poor organization and a horrible index that follows it's own inexplicable logic.

E-mail links? No listing in the index. Same for such basic terms as: pop-up windows, navigation, browser windows, publishing, windows, importing, and printing. It was easier and less frustrating to flip through the entire book than to try to figure out the logic of the index.

If you chance on some information that you may need, put a placeholder or a stickynote there immediately; you may never find it again.

This 'Visual Quickstart guide' by Katherine Ulrich is really useless and was obviously written for beginners. If you have programming experience and are looking into using flash, I highly recommend that you DO NOT buy this book. The whole books basically teaches motion tweening and using basic drawing tools. It doesnt teach the power of flash or even teach you how to use the built in flash components either. If you want to learn how to make a cat dancing from one side of the stage to the other, than this book is great. If you want to learn how to build rich flash programs, then buy something else. Lets just put it this way: Chapter 14, page 533 finally introduces importing graphics and chapter 13 talks about Authoring Utilities.

I would give this book MINUS 5 stars if I could. Look, if you're writing a book about any sort of computer code (unforgiving stuff that doesn't work right if you get a character wrong), I think you have a responsibility to proofread the *@#*! thing. This book doesn't appear to have been proofread or had a technical editor give it more than a cursory glance. It's full of errors that will stop you cold. I've spent countless hours going over the same pages over and over again, trying to guess where the author's mistakes are. What a waste of time. Also, the instructions are written in incredibly unprecise language (terms like "frame", "keyframe" and "blank keyframe" are often used interchangeably - hey, brilliant writer, it makes a difference!), requiring you to guess what the writer really means.

Oh, they also lie: the book claims to have a supporting website with artwork files you can download, yet none exists - go look, there is none (I really could care less about downloading the files, but I was hoping to find a list of corrections for the many errors in the text - and found no ebsite where they claim one exists). I think this is just plain dishonest. Shame on them.

There's no way to contact the author to clarify/correct her errors, either (maybe she didn't want to get reamed by angry people who bought the book sending her email?).

Yeah, I'm mad I wasted 25 bucks on this piece of junk. I recommend you don't make the same mistake I did - instead I suggest you buy a book that the author actually proofread - 'cause this one clearly didn't bother with such trivial matters as getting details right.

This is a really terrible, terrible book, completely irresponsible. It would be a wonderful way to waste many, many hours of your time.
Feh!

I usualy rely on the Visual Quickstart guides to get me "up and running" on software I'm unfamiliar with because they start out slowly with brief introductions to the programmes' interface and move quickly onward. In this guide the first 240 pages are basically useless unless you've never used any image editing or illustration software before (or possibly ever used a computer). This would normally make it ideal for novices, but frankly, most will be disapointed with what little they will actually be able to do with the software after digesting the whole book. If you are considering buying this book don't do so unless you plan to purchase the corresponding "Quickpro" guide as well. If you have any experience with Illustrator, Freehand, Director, or even Non-Linear editing packages you shouldn't bother with this one at all.

Macromedia Flash For Windows & Macintosh by Katherine Ulrich (a specialist in graphics, publishing, and multimedia software) is a 613-page visual quickstart guide, intended for beginning through intermediate level users, and which combines pictures with concise easy-to-understand instructions and examples for swiftly assimilating the basics of how to use Macromedia Flash MX. An expertly written and highly accessible teach-yourself book, easy to grasp and follow, Macromedia Flash For Windows & Macintosh is a welcome and invaluable addition to any Macromedia Flash MX user's reference shelf.