PREFACE

There are more pantomimists on the planet than Flash developers—this book intends to do something about it!

What you need to know about this book is that it was written for beginning to intermediate users of Flash. That being said, we made a concerted effort to write examples that included an entire process using best practices within a real-world context as much as possible in order to present them in a way that would be most useful in day-to-day work, not in a petri dish.

Having been a beginner in Flash for more than 10 years now, I (Chris) thought that I might be able to help introduce this technology with an approach that not only demonstrates how to do something, but also explains why it works when you do it that way.

The parts of this book are organized into clear disciplines and should serve you well as a focused reference that includes solutions and explanations of common work tasks facing the Flash developer and designer alike, as well as a thorough introduction to the new features of Flash CS4 including IK and the new Motion Editor.

Flash has evolved in so many ways to be so many things. It has been a daunting task to attempt to explore and demonstrate the many uses of this tool in a single book. We sincerely hope that you can use this book from your first introduction to Flash through to some fairly advanced applications of the concepts within. Now take it—and go kick some pantomimist butt!

Layout conventions

To keep this book as clear and easy to follow as possible, the following text conventions are used throughout.

Important words or concepts are normally highlighted on the first appearance in bold type.

Code is presented in fixed-width font.

New or changed code is normally presented in bold fixed-width font.

Menu commands are written in the form Menu Submenu Submenu.

Where we want to draw your attention to something, we've highlighted it like this:

Sometimes code won't fit on a single line in a book. Where this happens, we use an arrow like this: .

This is a very, very long section of code that should be written all on
the same line without a break.