Director 8 Demystified

Roberts, Jason

ISBN 10: 0201709201 / ISBN 13: 9780201709209

Published by Macromedia Press, 2000

About this Item

The book has been read, but is in excellent condition. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine remains undamaged. Seller Inventory # GOR005147201

Bibliographic Details

Title: Director 8 Demystified

Publisher: Macromedia Press

Publication Date: 2000

Binding: Paperback

Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis:

There's no mystery to unleashing the creative powers of Macromedia Director. All your students need is the latest edition of this best-selling guide. Updated to cover Director 8's features and its one-click Shockwave publishing capabilities, Director 8 Demystified includes a CD-ROM with tutorials and sample scripts. Before your students can yell, ?Action!? they'll be creating streaming, multiuser content for presentations, CD-ROMs, and the Web, using text, graphics, animation, video, and sound.

Review:

When a book calls itself an "official guide" to something, readers inevitably get a little sceptical. But when you're dealing with an application as big as Macromedia Director, an official guide is actually a welcome sight. Director 8 Demystified offers a much-needed road map to the latest version of the multimedia content creation tool, and as the officially sanctioned guide, it offers a complete rundown of the new program.

Written in part by the author of Director 7 Demystified, and the author of the official Director 7 and Lingo Authorized, this new book provides insight from a pair of experienced users, developers, and writers. Broken down into three well-illustrated main sections (four, if you count the one that contains appendices, references and glossary), this massive volume starts with the basics of using Director and then digs deeper into Lingo, scripting, handling multiple movies and Shockwave. Book Three, "Special Topics", goes into lengthy discussions on debugging, troubleshooting, using digital audio and video and Xtras.

Sidebars with tips, important points to remember like compatibility issues, pointers to chapter numbers where a mentioned topic was previously discussed, and most importantly, new or changed features in version 8 appear frequently throughout the book. Although there are also plenty of exercises and examples, more project-based tutorials would have been welcome, especially something on large projects. Content, media management, and handling large content backups aren't dealt with in enough depth either.

Director 8 Demystified is an almost mandatory book for the serious Director user. Comprehensive, thorough and filled with code snippets and examples, it should be bundled with Director itself. --Mike Caputo