Re: FLASH: Flash 4 magic (counterpoint)

[Tom Green]

rampatadesign wrote:


>

on 4/20/00 9:29 PM, CarltheFishaol [dot] com at CarltheFishaol [dot] com wrote:

>

> carl

>

> this book is swimming with a ton of valuable information. Anyone serious

> about furthering their knowledge of Flash 4 Action Script cannot go without

> this one. I personally think it is a great resource to have. I am sure

> everyone else here will back this up. Be careful you might get hooked!

>

> >


Almostt, but I managed to spit the hook out.


Careful on that one, Brett, I had somewhat the  opposite reaction. It really is a

good book but I was seriously disappointed in the underlying assumption which is

you already know what is going on.


The book really does have a lot of useful AS stuff in it but in many respects is a

glorified typing lesson- type this code in and it will work. Where this approach

falls apart- esecially for the Newbie- is in two areas:


1. If you make a mistake and get a syntax error or something else that kicks out

an error, you are on your own. No troubleshooting. Even something as simple as

colour coding string literals and expressions would remove a ton of grief.


2. There is no explaination of why you are doing it. Using the calculator as an

example, there is a ton of AS from the precoded number keys that contain a ton of

variables in the "lesson" and there is no explanation of where they are and what

they do. So you blindly input the AS as given in the book and that's about it. No

explanation of how this variable relates to that variable which can be found

attached to  a number key.


I have been quite consistent on this list for quite a few months that many of the

AS tutorials out there are written for geeks by geeks. They tend to forget there

are a lot of designers out there who are new to Flash and really need to wrap

their minds around what is going on in the code. Once again, if you really wwant

to see how to do these things pick up the Director Books by either Roberts or

Rosenweig. They know how to do it and, for the life of me, I still don't

understand why the Flash community hasn't picked up on this.


The only person I know of who has taken a stab at it is Branden with his ongoing

Branden's Brain series.







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