Thursday 6 April 2006 @ 8:21 am
Just a little bit of shameless self-promotion: my book is just about to hit store shelves!
I’m the dude on the left, and my co-author on the right is Jeff Berg.
Man, that is a long process (probably about 1 year total from contract to publication). Prepurchase now! Buy them as Christmas presents, birthday presents, Bar Mitzvah presents, even chew-toys for your dogs! (Discounts for bulk purchases for 5 dogs or more). They also work great as monitor supports (about 3 inches per book). If you reeeeeeeeeeally want, you can even read it yourself and learn how to script with ActionScript 2.0 and Flash 8 (perish the thought)!
Enjoy!
— By Nathan Derksen PermaLink
August 18th, 2006 at 4:38 pm
Hello Nathan.
I recently purchased your book and have been working on it every day. I am up to Chapter 7.
I thought I would give you some feedback from a true beginners’ viewpoint.
Overall, the lesson material or chapters are fairly well explained - thus far. There are
more typos than reported in the errata at the wrox.com site - although they do not seem to
be major, so they are not really worth reporting thus far.
My biggest complaint is that some of your answers or “solutions” for the exercises at
the end of each chapter are “problematic”. I will give you some examples of
what I mean by this.
Chapter 3.
Exercise_2 - An if…else statement is supposed to be converted to a switch statement, but
your solution actually uses an if…else statement for half of it. Why?
Chapter 4.
Exercise_1 - Your solution used a “return 1″, “return -1″ and “return 0″ in the if….else
statements, but nowhere in the chapter or the book to this point is this type of return
discussed. How do you expect a beginner to understand this? I sure don’t.
Exercise_2 - Your solution uses the slice() method, but this method is not discussed in the
chapter at all or the book up to this point. How do you expect a beginner to know what this
method does if you don’t explain it, much less use it in a solution to an exercise?
Exercise_3 - This is not as important, but once again, you use something that is not discussed
in the chapter as part of the solution. eg. the onReleaseOutside event was not even require
as part of the exercise, yet you made it part of the solution. Why?
Chapter 5.
Exercise_4 - Your solution omits part of the exercise, namely, the part about “automatically
assigning dimensions if the input width and height values are 0, null, or undefined”. Why?
Chapter 6.
Exercise - Your solution does not work and appears to be missing the imageHolderClip
referenced in the loadImage function. I tried creating the clip and loading the images into
it, but am unable to get it to work. It is very frustrating when even the solutions to the
exercises don’t work.
Summary.
I am becoming increasingly frustrated as I proceed through each successive chapter in this
book. The chapters explain things as if to a beginner, but the exercises seem to expect the
beginner to look elsewhere for material/instructions in order to do them. With
each successive chapter my confidence in the book as a source for learning actionscript is
not exactly increasing. Perhaps you could post solutions to the problems with the exercises
in the errata for the book on the wrox.com site. And I would also suggest that you review
ALL of the exercises to correct problems/errors there. And by that, I ALSO mean using techniques
in exercise solutions that are not discussed up to that point in the book.
I suspect that if you have not heard from readers about the issues with the exercises, that
it is because they have not bothered to (try) to do them. Or they are programmers to begin
with…
I am sorry if my “review” seems harsh, but the quality of the exercises have been a major
disappointment from my perspective.
As you know, truly good actionscript training manuals are hard to find. I am hoping that you
will post corrections for the book as mentioned above so that the book can truly
be one of the better books on the subject. I cannot stress this enough…..
Please let me know what you think.
Michael
August 27th, 2006 at 1:02 pm
Hello Nathan.
It’s me again.
After re-reading my first post, which I did not mean to be public (I thought I was send a private email), and after further study, I think it would be good to (publicly) make some adjustments to my first post.
I apologize for saying that the Chapter 6 exercise does not work. I found what I missed, and it does work afterall. I apologize.
I am just starting Chapter 8 now.
The more I study the code examples up to this point, the more I see how elegant the code really is. My first post was far too critical - I must have been in one of those moods after a long day….
The code in this book really is superb. The technique of progressively changing the code examples to show how it can be improved is just excellent. This is going to be THE book to learn actionscript - there is simply no other book that I have seen that comes even close to explaining things like this one does. The more I get into it, the more I see. Good job on this one. It must have been a huge amount of work. Sorry about the hyper critical post previously. Every book has it’s problems, but the positive far outweighs the negative in this one, thus far. Really. I think you may have written a classic here. I wonder how many other beginners are trying this book and what they think.
Michael
September 4th, 2006 at 6:58 pm
No problem! Sorry for the delayed reply, I’ve been travelling lately and working from a hotel room. Thanks for the comments, they are great to hear! I will go through your comments in more detail shortly and see how I can help.
December 6th, 2006 at 5:10 pm
This book is very helpful and interesting…Great Job!!!
Fan of Don Lapre
http://www.callvirgil.com
webmaster@callvirgil.com
January 4th, 2007 at 3:07 am
Hello Nathan,
I bought your book in a large book store here in Belgium (www.fnac.be).
After quick reading most of the books available on the subject (flash 8, as 2 & 3), I must say that your book came out as the most comprehensive.
It is well written, apart from some typos, which the other poster pointed out, I find the exercises and the quality of code to be top-notch.
An example of which i learnt: Never heard of the “strong typing” before. But i can clearly see the benefits now.
Your book makes the difference in comparison to other related books in a few aspects:
1. Less pictures (no color, just b/w, thank god) which leaves place for more code & text. This also drives the prices down. (paid about 35 €). Around 40$ (?)
2. Exercises & try it out. You actually incite us to test the newly learnt things.
3. Clear and good use of language. I’m not a native english speaker. But everything you write is clear to me.
If i have the opportunity, i will recommend your book.
btw: working on new projects lately? (ie new books?)
My best regards,
Nikolaas
January 6th, 2007 at 12:31 pm
Great, thanks for the praise! I appreciate feedback, good and bad (but of course I prefer the good
), so thanks!
Unfortunately, there are no technical books planned on the immediate horizon. They take a huge amount of effort (9 months of hard-core writing for this one) but I may still do another one once I’ve recovered from this one. I have a photo book in the works, but it will be a while before that makes it out.
November 5th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
so worried,我才在当当网买了你的书,当然是中文版的.才开始看呢,老板就要叫我作一个flash游戏动画!!我以前只作一些美工,还有旗帜广告条之类的,现在叫我如何是好??现在叫我作游戏耶,晕~~~~你这一本书这么厚,我选了好久才选到的,看完再作是不可能的了,我好想抱着这本书哭啊~~~~~~~~
I want to ask you, you learn the as2.0 used how long? and do you understand the Chinese?
You are so erudite! I hope that 有一天我能和你一样~~~~~~~~~~