Macromedia Flash 5 Design - From Concept to Creation is a book created by the artists, animators, and programmers of the epic software group. Its design is to lead the reader through complete projects, including the actual animations and time line source viewed from the companion CD. The illustration to the right shows a screen shot greatly reduced of a Source View of a particular exercise.

The purpose of the book is to present complete tutorials of different types of projects from complex animations to creating a multimedia order forms for e-commerce. There are 21 chapters in the book plus appendices and a glossary. Chapters 1 and 2 are simple introductions to Macromedia Flash 5 itself. These chapters not only introduce the reader to very, very basic elements of Flash 5, but also, give the reader some links for more information from the web. However, one of the links, the flashkit site, states that it is always moving its subject matter around. I could not find the tutorials as listed in the links. Many other links were listed and most of these could be found. Since all web sites, to stay current and not get top heavy must be updated and changed, it would have been better for the tutorials to have been included on the CD-ROM. There is a links component to the companion CD, however, which links the homepage of the sites, and other tutorials can be found on these sites.

The CD that accompanies the book is impressive to view. It contains all the chapters in the book plus additional material that can be seen from the screen shot when accessing book.exe. However, as I discovered, material was inadvertently left out.

To see how well I could follow the tutorials, I selected a few to do. I chose the one in chapter 8 at random. Almost at once, I found that I could not import the graphics as described because they were not on the CD.

I contacted the company about the material that was left out of the CD as well as those tutorials that I wanted to look at and could not find. I did not feel it was my responsibility to check all the links since tomorrow they could have been removed from the web. The company sent me the URL's for those links I found missing as well as the URL on their site for the images in Chapter 8. They are listed as follows:

Drawing in Flash
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Getting_Started/Drawing_-Eddie_Ca-21/index.shtml

Text Tools
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Getting_Started/Adding_T-Eddie_Ca-20/index.shtml

Tracing Bitmaps
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Getting_Started/Tracing_-Eddie_Ca-50/index.shtml

Adding Sound
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Audio/Adding_S-Eddie_Ca-19/index.shtml

Building Buttons
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Interactivity/Building-Jessamin-9/index.shtml

Using Keyframes
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Getting_Started/Using_Ke-Jessamin-16/index.shtml

Using Guide Layers
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Getting_Started/Guide_La-Eddie_Ca-11/index.shtml

Using Scenes
http://www.flashkit.com/tutorials/Getting_Started/Using_Sc-Jessamin-12/index.shtml

Chapter 8 Image File
http://www.prima-tech.com/books/book/4548/944/

I selected some other chapters at random and followed the instructions. Having created animations in Flash 5 prior to reading the book, I found the instructions easy to follow. If an area was new to me because I had not used it in my own animations, I found it easy to learn. However, in my opinion, important elements were left out, especially, if using these animations on the web. For example, even though the graphics were left out of Chapter 08, I decided to test the speed of the movie in downloading from the web because it appeared to have bottlenecks. After checking streaming, accessed from the Flash Menu by selecting: Control/test movie/View/Show Streaming, I saw many bottlenecks which would reduce the movie's speed of loading from the web. Also, the preloading time was very long as shown on the left hand part of the testing screen. I loaded the movie to my test web site and on a 56K modem with not so great speed (probably similar to the way most 56K modems connect) after I minute I still had slow motion movements on the screen and the whole movie hadn't played yet. It consisted of 302 frames at a rate of 30 fps (frames per second.) It should have taken 10.1 seconds to play at a lower bandwidth than I was using. All this information is contained in the illustration to the left.

I decided to try another movie which was created using vector art and not bitmapped art as in the Chapter 08 example which would have accounted, to a degree, for the poor downloading time. The time for the action to start in the Chapter 07 xmas.swf movie too was also a little long with the first scene being on the screen for apprximately 24 seconds. See the illustration to the right.

The book does have a well explained appendix that highlights some of the major actions that one would use in creating a flash movie in addition to a well illustrated section on 3rd party software. Since actions can be confusing, this short appendix is very useful.

After using the CD further, and looking at the back cover of the book which lists the contenst of the CD-Rom, I found other items missing.

While the concept of using the tutorials as templates to create one's own work and the variety of examples is good, the feeling I get from the book is that it was hastily put together. This is only a supposition, but the errors that I found and the details overlooked make it less of a product than it could have been.