Book Title:
		The Flash Anthology
		Authors:
		Steven Grosvenor
		Publisher:
		sitepoint

Flash Anthology by Steven Grosvenor is not your typical Flash book. It doesn't make teaching you the basics of Flash, the secret properties of objects, or ActionScript its primary goal. Instead, this book takes a different approach and teaches the aforementioned concepts by allowing you to construct and deconstruct Flash special effects. In their tutorial based format, you first learn to create the effect, but then the author goes through and explains why the effect works. In the end, you learn not only how to create a cool effect, you also learn the theory and concepts behind why the effect works!

The book starts off by providing instructions and explanations to create basic Flash effects involving every day items such as text and geometric shapes. The effects are by no means simple or dry. As you progress through the book, the effects that you create become more elaborate and complicated. For example, one such special effect that you create, teaches you how to create a basic Flash-based MP3 player by taking data both from an XML file and the ID3 tags. Thankfully, the clear explanations and directions make the complicated Flash effects such as the Flash MP3 player, flash database forms, video mosaics, and more easily understandable.

Overall, I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in a book that goes beyond explanations of concepts. While the author does a good job of providing explanations that make even complicated effects seem simple, I believe that beginners and other users not familiar with Flash AS programming will appreciate the techniques covered in this book more after getting a better grasp of the AS language from other sources. If you are familiar with Flash and looking for a book that teaches you how to create visually appealing and technologically advanced Flash effects, this book is definitely for you.

Something minor I noticed is that the book's Flash Resources section seems to be missing a link to kirupa.com, but I cannot hold that against them...on their first edition at least

I hope the information helped. If you have any questions or comments, please don't hesitate to post them on the kirupa.com Forums. Just post your question and I, or our friendly forum helpers, will help answer it.

The following is a list of related tutorial and help resources that you may find useful:

How to use the Forums New, Upcoming, and In-Progress Tutorials How to Help out kirupa.com Writing Tutorials

Cheers!
	Kirupa Chinnathambi kirupaBlog