New Masters: Flash Annual 2002 will give competent web artists inspiration on cutting-edge Flash design techniques, as well as hard tutorial information on how to build top class effects. The format builds on the best of the original best-selling title while improving in areas where the first volume was weaker, (e.g. generic customisable code examples), while the talents, the inspirations and effects are all of the moment and represent the mature and expert deployment of the staggering new capabilities of Flash 5 ActionScript.
The main body of the book is an evolution from the original format. This time, as well as the Inspiration + Tutorial sections, we add a third section to each chapter, The Next Step. Part summary, part chapter commentary, part code overview, The Next Step section teases out the reusable and generic elements of the previous tutorial and suggests ways forward for the reader. Includes CD-ROM with animated tutorials and video interviews with authors
The great thing about
New Masters of Flash: The 2002 Annual is that whether you have never heard of Flash or have spent the better part of your adult life coding ActionScript, it is likely to be one of the most useful, inspiring and thought-provoking books on Web design you'll read this year.
The Annual closely follows the style of the original New Masters of Flash . Designers of some of the most innovative Flash work on the Web talk about what influences them, how they came to be working on the Flash projects that gained them recognition and where they think it's all going. Then they move on to the technical stuff--revealing exactly how one of their projects is put together. This is a lot more useful than a tutorial because not only are these real-world examples, but cutting edge, original design that will define what's cool on Flash sites for the next six months--a long time in Web years.
Introductions by Jonathan Gay, the developer of Flash's predecessor FutureSplash Animator, and Yugo Nakamura, set the tone for the whole book which is as much about the potential for Flash as it is a window into current techniques.
Highlights include Samuel Wan's pollen movie, Brian Limond's Time (www.limmy.com), Mickey Stretton's time-based interface (www.stopfresh.com) and Marc Stricklin's seriously weird "freak on a leash" (www.brittle-bones.com).
The all-important CD contains all the book's projects in a flash tutorial presentation complete with FLA files, interviews and the finished demos. --Ken McMahon