I am new to Flash MX and recently downloaded the Macromedia Flash MX trial version. I also purchased the following three Flash MX books to help me get started: Macromedia FLASH MX creative web animation and interactivity, Flash MX HOT, and Foundation Flash MX.

After about a week working with Flash MX HOT and Macromedia Flash MX creative web animation, I was totally lost and had pretty much decided that I wouldn't purchase the full Macromedia Flash MX version when my trial time had expired.

I gave the Foundation Flash MX by friendsofed a try and boy am I hooked. This book is probably the best teaching tool and reference book I have ever purchased. Great step-by-Step instructions and screen snapshots that are so easy to follow. Now I now I'll be buy Macromedia Flash MX when the trial version expires.

The book comes with a great support web site with user forums for beginners to advanced users.

I couldn't be happier this this book!!!

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Never judge a book by its cover. Yep, that's very true. On the back cover of this book there's a phrase praising how this book is the best step for you to take if you're a nooB (this means newbie, for you people who aren't up to date with the lingo of the net :) to Flash MX. When I read that I thought to myself, "I'll be the judge of that" and by golly judge it I did. And the final verdict? They were right!

The 603 pages that made up this book was like the exact guide I needed in my seemingly blind exploration into the world of Flash MX. Yes, I'll admit this was my second Flash MX Beginner book (My first one was Macromedia Flash MX: Training from the Source by Chrissy Rey, it's been reviewed on this site already) but it might as well have been my first. I love how when they said this book was going to give you a solid foundation to Flash MX, they managed to live up to that phrase! And when they congratulate you at the end of the book and call you an "intermediate" Flash MX user, they mean it. By no means are they saying you've got it all because, well, you don't. But what you do have at the end of this book (and that is if you actually go through all the chapters properly!) is a very solid foundation in Flash MX. Don't be discouraged to think that all you did was move from a complete beginner/novice user of Flash MX to just an intermediate user. Don't forget that a lot of other people out there who seem to know how to use Flash very well, actually don't know a lot of the inside stuff that they may not have come across often, or may have come across but don't understand the concept behind it. I'll give you an example, ask them what a named anchor is in Flash MX and what is its use? Ah ha! Since it's new to Flash MX, all those Flash 5 people who think they know it all don't seem to know this now do they?? There you go, you learn all about this in the book! See? You're alraedy one step ahead of them!

I've heard people complain about how this book talks too much and they'd prefer the books that were more learning and less reading. Well let me tell you this, the less effort you put into learning this program, the less you'll get out of it. You're not going to a world class sprinter if you train only once a blue moon right?

Let me also remind everyone that this book is not meant to help you much with Actionscripting at all, that's covered in another book from Friends of ED called Foundation Actionscript for Flash MX by Sham Bhangal and Ben Renow-Clarke, so the two chapters titled Intermediate ActionScript Part 1 and 2 are meant to give you your first taste of using this in your movies, and I'm sure there will be a lot of people who disagree with them teaching it through the Normal Mode of the actions panel instead of the Expert mode, but personally, I think they made a very wise decision.

The first time I had my dose of Actionscript was when I worked to chapter seven of the book Macromedia Flash MX: Training from the Source by Chrissy Rey which introduced me to the language and made me type code manually in the empty window of the Expert mode in the actions panel inside of Flash MX. The result? I was confused and I actually got scared of actionscript from there, partly because I had never programmed before and partly because I just didn't understand what was exactly going on as I copied the code from the pages of the book onto my screen because I'd wonder what all those brackets meant, why I had to space my code that way and other stuff along those lines. But with Foundation Macromedia Flash MX, since they use the Normal mode which was made up of a little window with little blanks for you to fill in, I could just type in the information I knew about my Flash MX movie I had created along with the tutorials and I'd get the outcome I wanted. No special code, just give Flash the info and it does it all for you. It is enough for you to create basic interaction. As much as it would limit the flexibility of what I can do with my code, the authors of this book didn't forget that I was still a complete nooB (please don't make me re explain what this word means :P) to Actionscript, and all I knew was information about my movie, not the code I needed to type! No code mumbo jumbo, and I was still getting the work done. Even though I'm positive you'll change to the expert mode as you become more experienced in Actionscripting, the Normal mode is a perfect start.

You might even argue and ask what exactly makes this book better than other beginner books out there? Well I can tell you one thing, it explains things from a different point of view, and it explains things clearly. That's the key ingredient that gives this book its flavour. Instead of trying to cram stuff in less hours so that it seems you can learn faster, it takes the other, supposedly riskier approach of actually taking its time to explain stuff, and letting you learn slowly. This works very well for me, I'll tell you that. I'd rather spend an extra 10 hours on tutorials and really know what I'm doing than spend less time and still not harness the foundational skills I need for even the most basic stuff like nesting movie clips. One thing though I'd like to point out that goes against my praises concerns the portfolio you build in the book. It's an exercise that lasts through out the book and you add more and more stuff to it as you go along. It would definitely have helped a lot if there was some way of letting me test my movie to see what I've done in the earlier chapters, because I'd go through (from what I remember) like half the book and all I could see was the front page of my portfolio I made, I was eager to see my work in action already! Just something I think the guys at Friends of ED could have worked on (yes I'm demanding, I know...) as they designed how the portfolio would be made up.

I'd like to also mention, unlike some other books, this book doesn't divide its chapters into how many hours it will take to complete. There's a good and a bad side to it. The bad side first, well, sometimes it's better to know that a chapter takes one hour to complete so you can plan your time accordingly so you don't have to stop halfway through if you don't manage to finish the chapter before you have to stop and do something else. The good side, if the chapter actually takes like two hours to complete, you wouldn't know this and you won't be discouraged to start because of the long duration.

And now to conclude, I'd like to just say I'm proud to be one of the many people who actually took time out of their lives to go through this book because when I reached the end of the book, the skills I had built up were well worth the long hours thanks to this book being such a perfect foundation to Flash MX.

Rating: (5/5).