Unlock the power of Adobe Flash and bring stunning animations to life onscreen. It's easy with Flash CS5: The Missing Manual. You'll start creating animations in the first chapter, and learn to produce effective, well-planned visuals that get your message across. This entertaining edition includes a complete primer on animation, a guided tour of the program's tools, new illustrations, and lots of details on working with video.

Every chapter in this book provides step-by-step Flash tutorials. Beginners will learn to use the software in no time, and experienced Flash designers will improve their skills.

• Learn to draw objects, animate them, and integrate your own audio and video files
• Add interactivity, and use special effects, morphing, and much more
• Use Adobe AIR to create full-blown, desktop applications with Flash
• Check your work with the book's online example files and completed animations
• Discover new Flash toolkits and features such as Frameless Animation
• Learn how to automate your drawings and animations with ActionScript 3.0

With this book, you can get started with Flash CS5 with little or no programming experience. You'll learn in jargon-free English exactly what you need to know to use Flash effectively, while avoiding common pitfalls right from the start.

5 Ways to Build Flash CS5 Projects Faster
By Chris Grover

Whether you’re creating the next South Park, showing video on your website, or designing a cool desktop game, you’re eager to get that project out the door as fast as possible. Here are five ways to save time when you’re building Flash projects:

Start Fast with Templates

1. Start Fast with Templates. With Flash CS5 templates, all the tedious, time-consuming setup is done for you. For example, you can choose between two different photo album templates--one even uses XML (extensible markup language) to manage the photo files. Almost a dozen different animation templates provide pre-designed control over movement and other visual effects. You can find working examples for drag-and-drop interfaces, lip syncing for animated characters, and walking figures using IK Bones.

2. Make It Move with Motion Presets. Want to make text zip onscreen, hang around long enough to be read, and then zip off? Want to make a ball drop from the sky, hit the ground, and then bounce back up? These are the kind of actions you can apply using motion presets. Simply drag a preset onto the object you want to move. Once you’ve applied a motion preset, you can tweak the motion using the usual Flash tools.

3. Hook Up with IK Bones. With IK Bones, the drawings in your Flash animations can have more realistic connections. You can connect the hip bone to the thigh bone, and then specify exactly how those bones rotate and affect each other as they move. In Flash CS5, the new Spring property lets you fine-tune the action and reaction for different types of motion.

4. Code Quickly with Code Snippets. Flash CS5 provides code snippets that you can drop into your projects and then customize for your own purposes. You’ll also find snippets for ActionScript tasks, like starting and stopping movies, timeline navigation, animation motion and effects, loading and unloading external files, and working with audio and video.

5. Step Lively with Code Hinting. Code hinting is more than just a reference manual. It also auto-completes keywords and chunks of code. That both saves time and keeps spelling errors to a minimum. Code hinting also prompts you to fill in parameters if your statement requires them.

Customer Reviews & Comments
§ Adobe products, all that I have encountered, set some sort of standard for abysmal documentation. In fact, a whole industry has arisen to instruct people in the basics of such software as Photoshop and Flash. Since people have complained about this for years, it is clear that adequate online and printed manuals are not a corporate priority for Adobe. It is good that we have books such as this one from O'Reilly to ease the burden of learning the basics and finding out how to take advantage of new version features for those who have mastered the basics. I think most people reading this short review know what Flash is all about so I won't belabor the point by enumerating all the topics in these 700+ pages. The author has integrated images well into the flow of the text--although I think sometimes not having color takes a bit of life out of the action. The content homes in on the skills and features related to the most implemented aspects of the software, such as timeline animation. This is the book's real value. The one negative, a small one, is that the book barely touches on the new trend we see with Flash: the construction of complete commercial applications with this technology. Even so, the last chapter (21) "Introducing Adobe AIR", is a very good introduction to this new trend. §

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