Well before Ajax and Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation hit the scene, Macromedia offered the first method for building web pages with the responsiveness and functionality of desktop programs with its Flash-based “Rich Internet Applications”. Now, new owner Adobe is taking Flash and its powerful capabilities beyond the Web and making it a full-fledged development environment.
Rather than focus on theory, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook concentrates on the practical application of ActionScript, with more than 300 solutions you can use to solve a wide range of common coding dilemmas. You’ll find recipes that show you how to:

Detect the user’s Flash Player version or their operating system
Build custom classes
Format dates and currency types
Work with strings
Build user interface components
Work with audio and video
Make remote procedure calls using Flash Remoting and web services
Load, send, and search XML data
And much, much more …

The complete tutorial on integrating Flash and XML to create powerful Web applications! Beyond eye candy- Integrate Flash with dynamic content, backend databases, server apps — even other live users! Covers ActionScript, HTTP, SQL, PHP, and much more. Includes extensive sample code library on CD-ROM. Instead of just "gee-whiz" animation or cool user interfaces, Flash pros need to build truly useful sites that are viable for the long-term. That means interfacing Flash with dynamic content, backend databases, server-based applications, and even with other live users. The key to all these is XML. Now, theres a book that shows you exactly how to build enterprise Flash applications that integrate XML — and leverage its full power. Flash and XML is structured in 19 progressive lessons. In each lesson, the authors teach a key principle of Flash enterprise integration by first explaining it, and then demonstrating it with working code. The book begins with an introduction to Flash and ActionScript thats ideal for working developers, and also serves as a useful refresher for Flash professionals. Next, the authors introduce XML, review the role of HTTP in Web development, and start writing PHP-based server code for accessing back-end data. Next, they show how to extend Flash and server-side systems to a third-tier, connecting with back-end databases via SQL. Every chapters code samples build on whats come before, constructing a robust application that encompasses client-side Flash code, server-side XML, back-end remote database access, and even emulated "peer-to-peer" connections. For both Flash professionals (with or without XML experience) and software engineers involved in Web development (with or without Flash experience).

Macromedia Flash is fast becoming the Web’s most widely used platform for creating rich media with animation and motion graphics, but mastering Flash isn’t easy. Most entry-level books teach through simple examples that concentrate on either animation or scripting, but rarely both together. To get the most from Flash 8, you not only need to be proficient in programming/interface design, you need the creativity for story telling and the artistic insights to design fluid animation.Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity teaches Flash design rather than simply Flash itself. With a standalone series of walkthroughs and tutorials for Flash beginners coming from a graphics field, this book teaches Flash in the context of real-world projects. Rather than learn a Flash tool for the sake of it, you learn which areas of Flash are important, and which are less used, simply by seeing how typical content is actually created. And rather than a text-heavy approach, this graphically rich book leads you through hands-on examples by illustration.

As a creative professional or interactive developer, you’ll be amazed at the exciting possibilities presented to you by the new features available in Flash 8; but as a busy designer, we know you won’t have as much time as you’d like to explore these new additions. Never fear–this book wastes no time looking at timeline basics, tweens, or movie-publishing options–it focuses exclusively on the new Flash 8 features, getting you quickly up to speed with a combination of illustrative tutorials, handy references, and inspirational examples.

By the end of the book, you’ll know that there’s no shortage of new tools to enhance and inspire your Flash development; and since this book is written by some of the community’s leading Flash experts, you’ll know you’re in good hands. If you’re looking to master Flash 8 with a minimum of time and effort, then this is the only book for you.

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This practical, nuts-and-bolts toolkit puts theory into practice with ready-made answers to common Flash development questions. It’s the perfect resource for Flash developers, as well as designers who are ready to start doing development work.
Flash 8 Cookbook offers quick look-up (and cross-referenced) recipes in four main categories:

Creating Flash Content
Building Interactive Flash Interfaces
Adding Multimedia and Data
Planning Flash Projects
Using O’Reilly’s popular Problem/Solution/Discussion Cookbook format, this book offers 280 standalone recipes that include a brief explanation of how and why the solution works, so you can adapt it to similar situations you may run across in the future. For people who say, “I understand everything in theory, but I don’t know where to start in practice,” this book offers ready-to-use answers to real-world problems.

Format: DVD (ROM)Platform: Windows & MAC OS

This training series produced in HD includes over 24 hours of indexed tutorials on the industry’s most advanced authoring environment for creating interactive web sites. You will dramatically expand your knowledge of Flash and its extensive capabilities.

XML is a completely platform agnostic data medium. Flash is able to make use of XML data, which is very useful when you are creating Rich Internet Applications — it allows you to populate Flash web interfaces with data from pretty much any source that supports XML as a data medium, be it databases, raw XML files, or more excitingly, .Net applications, web services, and even Microsoft Office applications such as Excel and Word!

In this book, Sas Jacobs first introduces XML itself–what it is, its syntax, its associated technologies (such as CSS and XSLT,) and how to get XML out of your applications in a format Flash can use.

Then she shows how to use the XML object to stream XML data into Flash, and how to use the XMLConnector component and XML Sockets to build advanced Flash/XML applications. Numerous example applications are built throughout the book, including an MP3 player, XML photo gallery, an Excel-driven web catalog, Access and Word-driven content management systems, and an XML-driven chat application.

With the release of Macromedia Flash 8, Flash is now the most powerful and widely used client software for the web, and it’s the only one that runs on virtually every browser, on every platform. It also features ActionScript, a scripting language with great object-oriented support. As such, Flash is the ideal platform for producing sophisticated object-oriented web applications. Complex applications demand a solid understanding of object-oriented programming (OOP) techniques, regardless of the language and platform used, and this book will provide all you need.

Object-Oriented ActionScript For Flash 8 teaches the theory and practice of OOP with ActionScript. You do not need any extensive prior programming experience, you just need to want to go beyond the usual Flash interfaces. Authors, and working Flash developers, Peter Elst and Todd Yard take you through the complete development cycle of a series of related applications, using numerous step-by-step instructions. You’ll be able to develop highly reusable applications and services that leverage the dynamic features in Flash.

This book demonstrates professional OOP skills and techniques that are completely transferable to other programming languages and technologies, including Inheritance, Polymorphism, managing classes, component development, consuming web services, and much more. It also includes some cutting edge ActionScript programming techniques, and animation and effects classes.

This practical, nuts-and-bolts toolkit puts theory into practice with ready-made answers to common Flash development questions. It’s the perfect resource for Flash developers, as well as designers who are ready to start doing development work.

Flash 8 Cookbook offers quick look-up (and cross-referenced) recipes in four main categories:

• Creating Flash Content
• Building Interactive Flash Interfaces
• Adding Multimedia and Data
• Planning Flash Projects

Using O’Reilly’s popular Problem/Solution/Discussion Cookbook format, this book offers 280 standalone recipes that include a brief explanation of how and why the solution works, so you can adapt it to similar situations you may run across in the future. For people who say, “I understand everything in theory, but I don’t know where to start in practice,” this book offers ready-to-use answers to real-world problems.