Friends of ED has been releasing competently compiled web design books made with collaboration from some of the best for quite a few years now and when they offered a few books to the Flash Insider team to read I jumped at the chance. The first book I cracked open was the latest in their Essentials series, Flash 8 Essentials. The Essentials books are meant to grab current and future web designers and give them a quick dip into the latest web design software. This book was written a quick guide to Flash 8 and includes enough tutorial and code to get most designers and developers up to speed. The writing style of this book is similar to a motivational seminar on Flash. This helps the reader become extremely excited about the new version and can make you feel like you can do everything in the book.

Flash 8 Essentials has six authors, but the reader will not notice a definite change from one chapter to the next. Each author has already made a name for himself in the Flash design and development world. Two of the authors have already written a few books on this subject and one helped to create the current Developer Certification Exam.

read the rest of the review after the jump

Though the book doesn't come with a CDROM, all the referenced FLAs and samples can be found quite easily on the Friends of ED website. The screenshots within the book help to bring the content to the reader on an OS independent platform. This is good for designer like me who work with Mac for personal projects but on PC at work. If I have to reference back to the book at anytime in the future, I know it won't matter where I am or what OS I am in.

Flash 8 Essentials is divided into 10 chapters plus an appendix. The chapters take you down the road or all the new and improved features and leave you with the impress that coding will be very important for this version of Flash. The first chapter gives a quick overview of everything in the book. Each chapter after the first gives at least one concise example of a major feature and includes well-explained code and easily understood figures. Then the appendix gets into a few advanced tutorials that touch on dynamic bitmap manipulation, file uploads and more.

At the end of the book I felt ready to tackle a bunch of new projects and pondered ways to improve some old ones (I've been wanting to retackle an old Camera() based project for a while. I think most will find this a good addition to their technical bookshelf, but new Flashers will need to invest in a few other books in addition to this one as they come up to speed, including at least one Flash bible or over reaching glossary type book that explains it all. Experienced Flashers will find this to be an essential part of their library in order to transition easily to Flash 8, if they haven't already.

Now, what am I going to do with this book? If you are in the New Orleans area and come out the NOMMUG Tenth Anniversary of Flash party on Tulane's campus on August 14th, you will have a chance to win the now well-read copy I used for this review. See you there!

About this book:
Flash 8 Essentials
by Paul Barnes-Hoggett, Stephen Downs, Glen Rhodes, Craig Swann, Matt Vierman, and Todd Yard.
ISBN: 1590595327
publisher: friends of ED

Er, um... While flipping through my Flash search feeds today I came across a post by  Jean-Francois Arseneault at ArseNealt.ca blurting out how he didn't realize how complex Flash is. He downloaded the 30 day trial of Flash 8 recently, installed the app and opened the IDE to its shinny new GUI in OSX. He was quickly over powered by the shock of panels and all sorts of options to be found once inside and almost immediately had to close down the program. He says he will grab a beginner's guide soon in order to get into Flash for real in the future.

Reading this reminded me of the first time I jumped into Flash with Flash 4 on a Mac G3 workstation with OS9. My hardship involved jumping from Windows to Mac and jumping from limited Director 7 and Photoshop 5 experience into the new Flash world. Though my jump from Director to Flash was probably easier than my original jump from straight web design (only Frontpage and Corel, please forgive me, it was 1998) to Director. I lucked into jumping into the IDE via an art class on Digital media and immediately jumped into scripting (using my background in Java and other object oriented programming languages really helped here) and animation(Director and experience with art in general helped here). And now I'm here... What about you? How was your first time? Did you get thrown off track till finding that perfect starter guide? Did you dive right in and push out that first site or game or what ever? Let me know in the comments below.

Back in art school, one of my first Digital Media classes (they teach art using digital media as you medium, yay weird web art) required me to buy a certain Flash 5 book by a Mr. Hillman Curtis. Unfortunately the book was extremely useful as an art reference, but next to useless as a Flash reference. It did inspire me while creating a few projects this year, so when Jan Kabili emailed me about an interview by Inside Mac of Curtis that was online I found myself needing to tell you to check it out. Curtis is known for experimental and commercial Flash based design going back for a number of years and currently he is working on a new video project. Feel free to download the interview for yourself and check out the main Hillman Curtis site for some inspiration of your own. Link goes to iTunes download of interview.

In case you're like me and stuck no where near Seattle this week, but wish you could learn more about integration from Photoshop and Flash, Jack Nack has a few good links for your. Jack's buddy Michael Ninness compiled a set of tutorials and even gave a talk at FlashForward this week about the best ways to combine our two favorite pursuits. I only wonder if this means animated cartoons showing off the perfectly toned body attached to someone else's head... Back to the subject at hand though. Start your tutorials with one describing how to adjust your beloved Photoshop away from its print/camera roots and closer to your web needs. Then check out the rest at the link.

Back in August we discussed the possiblity of moving Flash Player to the PlayStationPortable. Apparently someone has finally done it. Make has a post up about the release of a brand new hack created by PSPHacks.net that has gotten Flash Player 7 to work on an older firmware of the PSP (1.5). They is currently working on getting this to work on the 2.0 firmware for PSP, but in the meantime, crack open that PSP and add a little Flash goodness.

What does this mean to you? Well Flashers should be able to easily modify they Flash 7 (MX2004) goodness to look great in widescreen mode. Plus someone may want to create some old style FLVs (pre-On2 codec) and play them widescreen style on the go.

Check out sample pics at Make and download the hack yourself from PSPHacks.net

Our big blog brother, Engadget posted a great tutorial this morning showing you exactly how to run Flash (and therefore Flash-based-games) on you very own X-Box 360. Head on over for the full tutorial. Unfortunately the Dashboard upgrade released today by Microsoft will break this hack, but if you want to wait on the update try it out. I wonder if you could use this for basic FLV files too? If so, this would be a cool way to stream Google video (via the online player, not the purchased kind) or YouTube video to your X-Box 360 for HD viewing. Enjoy.

If you've been reading the Design Weblog lately (gotta love a blog brother) then you might have noticed that transparent screens are starting to come back in fashion. While reading this morning's post I got a quick Flash idea and then David posted about the updated Flash fire code and bingo transparent screens on fire! But how? First grab your Flash 8 and start up a new project. Create a stage of any size and add you video object to the stage, cover everthing now. Attach your camera object to the video object. Add some fire code, or what ever to make it extremely cool. Save and publish.

Now grab two video cameras. One will be your Flash based transparent screen feed. The other will record your exploit. Attach the tranparent screen cam the the back of your monitor/laptop screen. With careful positioning you should be able to create the perfect transparent screen. Now open the Flash movie in Flash player and hit Crtl-F or Apple-F to maximize the file. Voila transparent animated screen. Now just create a fake desktop in your file and record for posterity. Or, Windows users only (I think), enable active desktop and add your Flash File as a full back ground again.

Note, I have not gotten the chance to try this yet. So this is just an idea with no proof of concept, but feel free to try it yourself and send me a link to your project.