Foundation XML for Flash (Foundation)

Flash Hacks

Php Books

Foundation PHP 5 for Flash (Foundation)

Format: Paperback
Author: David Powers
ReleaseDate: 01 March, 2005
Publisher: friends of ED
Rating:

Such a rare find, and great writing.
Over the years Flash rapidly went from being that Goofy web toy through versions 3-4, to being something that you could potentially make something. Bah! Who so ever has a bad review concerning this book are those who think that there's a magical, simple solution in making advanced web sites in Flash.. . practical. With a lot of voodoo, and enough time on your hands. To an actual application development environment. . . if you were "down" for some XML. But since the advent of Flash MX 2004, it became a full on scary piece of application software, ready to contend with all the full forced development environments such as VB. net and so fourth.

There's only one problem. Macromedia is legendary for giving you arcane, nearing on esoteric text as to how you actually use it's products. The marketing behind that is, of course. . . so you buy books. Lots and lots of books. Only, the Macromedia books in question STILL don't give you enough information to actually do anything on an intensive level with Flash. You learn as to how to make each of the components work on their own. You can make a quick and dirty web service connection. You can learn how to change the appearance of those components as well. You also can get a huge lesson as to the advancement of Actionscript 1. 0 to Actioscript 2. 0 But you're never given enough information as to how to develop a REAL web site. UNLESS: you're to use their even more expensive product. . . ColdFusion. Then, the doors are unleashed to all these various and wonderful things one can do with Flash.

And again, tell me what web hosting solution provides CF at an affordable price? Uh. . . yeah. That's why the world has gone PHP mad.

So, here we have on one side of the fence, the worlds most controversial (yet very sexy) piece of gadgetry that no one has been able to use quite right. On the other hand, we have the most popular web scripting language in the world. Advanced enough to make enterprise web apps if so needed, but typically used on a much more "simplistic" level but a more "creative" Market. . . which can be argued as those creative designers who sought out to develop more technical skills to use Flash properly, and ended up learning PHP. . . because PHP ends up what more people want in the first place.

However, in comes David. . . and his book. And David basically says "I'll show you how to plug in both these technologies". . . And I can not for the life of me understand how people can't get the basics. In the first round, he basically explains the one simple step into all our inner connectivity issues: loadVars. For those who have any sort of dilemma in understanding after reading this book, there's the one big hint as to what you can rummage around in the Macromedia vaults, and perhaps even a Google search now and then.

Having a book that is project driven, verses simple little code snippets takes care of two problems in one fell swoop. Not only do we get to see the magic of the loadVars in action, over and over again. We are offered great ideas to implement on web sites. I mean, the first example: AN EMAIL FORM! And a content management system? (and a token Hangman game, because Flash is great for that!) This is fantastic. . . one is given the blue print for real web site solutions through this book.

My only "complaint" Why not have an entire corporate site delved out in Flash? I mean, there's more hype than there's actual results (not that I don't believe in Flash). . . And the only real example I've ever seen on a larger level is the Macromedia exchange for downloading Extensions.

So, I am intensely enthusiastic about this book (and the writing. Very clear and very friendly). But I would want a volume II, and I want an advanced corporate type site developed in that one!.

Examples are unwieldy.
I was hoping it would go through the basics of sending information from Flash to MySQL via PHP, but it was a disappointment. I didn't care for this book. The main problem with this book is that it teaches by presenting the reader with overly complicated examples. Rather than using bite-sized examples, the author uses a couple of very large projects that the reader is expected to wade through and decipher. Yes, the examples do have comments but it's extremely laborious to decipher all of that code just to get the information you need. I've worked through to page 370 so far and haven't yet learned how to send "hello world" from Flash to a MySQL database and it's not possible to just look that up somewhere. You have to go through and understand the huge examples in their entirety before you can understand any part of them. For someone who is learning this, the examples look like spaghetti code. They are too unwieldy.
Yes, there is a tutorial theme with this book, but the tutorial part is for PHP, not for ActionScript or how to connect the two. When the author gets around to integrating ActionScript with PHP that's when the huge examples and the resulting confusion comes in.
There can't be a very large audience for this book. The step-by-step part in the beginning teaches PHP and there's plenty of other books on the market that do a much better job of that. There's a small section that covers MySQL, but there's plenty of better books that teach MySQL. There is virtually no instruction of ActionScript just code examples and comments. What makes this book different from the other PHP or MySQL books is that it presumably teaches how to use PHP and MySQL with ActionScript. The problem is it does a poor job of that.
You have to wade through multiple lines of digression to get to the main point. When you do get to the main point, the explanation is often confusing. The workflow is not effective. The parts that need explanation are not explained and parts that don't need explanation are covered in a wordy fashion. This book does not have the polish that others like the Hands on Training series, or the Heads Up series have. I don't feel that the author has put himself in the place of the reader. This book needs an editor. Evidently they don't do that at "friends of Ed", but I'm not sure how one would go about editing this book. It would have to be gone over line-by-line. The result would be an entirely different book.
In its favor, the examples are kind of interesting although I'm not interested in the examples, I'm interested in learning the code. The website is up to date. There are a few mistakes in the code, but not many. Although the couple of mistakes that I encountered were not on the errata page.
I gave it 3 stars because the book is not terrible, it just falls down in a lot of important areas. It does have some teaching value and I plan to go back to it after I have more knowledge of the subject matter, but it will probably stay on my shelf for a while.
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Not exactly what I expected to be
I wished I had this book a couple of years earlier, it would've saved me a lot of time and money. This book is a really good book to start learning PHP. But this is actually the whole problem with this book. Yes, it covers flash, but it'll only learn you how you can work with PHP-variables in Flash. There are no projects that covers creating a complete flash project with PHP, it'll learn you how to create the scripts for Flash, so Flash can use the script. These tutorials can be found anywhere on the internet, so you don't really need this book.

It learns you more about PHP than Flash. Maybe I expected too much from it, but that's my opinion. After all, it's a good book for starting with PHP in flash.