A Note from Lynda

In my opinion, most people buy computer books in order to learn, yet it is amazing how few of these books are actually written by teachers. I take pride in the fact that this book was written by experienced teachers who are familiar with training students in this subject matter. In this book, you will find carefully developed lessons and exercises to help you learn Macromedia Flash MX— one of the most powerful animation and interactivity tools for the web.

This book is targeted towards beginning-level Web developers who need a tool to create creative, powerful, and interactive Web sites. The premise of the hands-on exercise approach is to get you up to speed quickly in Macromedia Flash MX, while actively working through the book's lessons. It's one thing to read about a product, and an entirely other experience to try the product and get measurable results. Our motto is, "read the book, follow the exercises, and you will know the product." We've received countless testimonials to this fact, and it is our goal to make sure it remains true for all of our hands-on training books.

Many exercise-based books take a paint-by-numbers approach to teaching. While this approach works, it's often difficult to figure out how to apply those lessons to a real-world situation, or understand why or when you would use the technique again. What sets this book apart is that the lessons contain lots of background information and insights into each given subject, which are designed to help you understand the process as well as the exercise.

At times, pictures are worth a lot more than words. When necessary, we have also included short QuickTime movies to show any process that's difficult to explain in text. These files are located on the H•O•T CD-ROM inside a folder called movies. It's our style to approach teaching from many different angles, because we know that some people are visual learners while others like to read, and still others like to get out there and try things. This book combines a lot of teaching approaches so you can learn Flash MX as thoroughly as you want to.

This book didn't set out to cover every single aspect of Macromedia Flash MX. The manual and many other reference books are great for that! What we saw missing from the bookshelves was a process-oriented tutorial that taught readers core principles, techniques, and tips in a hands-on training format.

—Lynda Weinman