Raymond J. Kimball, Program Director and Professor at Montgomery College - Scholarly review
Book Description
About EZ Flash 5:
If you are new to Flash, or an experienced Flash user, you will find this book to be exciting, informative, and offers a wealth of creative ideas and techniques for getting the most out of Flash.
This book provides over 30 short projects and over 100 experimental ideas that cover a variety of effects and techniques such as: Melting Type, Solar Explosions, Animated Typist using ActionScript, EZ Web Games, MP3 Sound Controllers, Dynamic Photography, Fading Web Paint, Motion Trails, Score Keeping for Web Games, Collision Detection, Creating and Testing Preloaders, and Interactive Web Portfolios. There are also tutorials for using Photoshop and Illustrator with Flash and a chapter on reverse engineering interesting Flash web sites. Additionally, this text provides a straightforward introduction to ActionScript. You will enjoy exploring new Flash ideas that are presented in a short (2-8 page), easy to follow, step-by-step format. This book allows you learn, create, and publish a variety of Flash effects quickly and easily.
If you have never worked with Flash you will appreciate the fact that from chapter two, you are producing web content. Rather than describing each palette and menu item, you will learn by doing. The projects were designed by a professional Flash instructor, peer reviewed, and classroom tested, to insure that they are accurate, exciting, and most importantly, easy to understand. Extensive screen shots makes it easier to learn. Short projects, means that you can gain a solid understanding of a single concept before moving onto the next.
For Educators
As an educator, I am sure my friends and colleagues will find this text ideal for classroom use. I could not find the Flash materials that I felt would best introduce new students as well as captivate experienced students. I started writing short projects to illustrate features and techniques in Flash and was delighted by the positive student response. Based on praise from students and colleagues I decided to pull these projects together into a text book. As a fellow academic I am sure you will quickly recognize how this text was designed to fit into different academic situations, and appeals to a variety of different learning styles. Because the projects are open ended this text should fit well with most courses that utilize Flash including Computer Applications, Visual Arts, Publishing, and of course Web and Internet curricula.All course materials (with the exception of the EZ Flash 5 book) on the Faculty only web site, are provided copyright free, for those who decide to use the text in their courses. These course materials are available for immediate use. Finally as a colleague, I am delighted to respond to your questions.
Educators Only: For a review copy in PDF format please email your request to Brad@comcast.net. Include your name, institutions name, academic email, and an office, department, or dept. chair phone number for verification purposes. Review copies are only provided to educators.
