adobe.Flash

How to Cheat in Adobe Flash CS4: The art of design and animation
$39.95
I am a beginning animator. I've bought this book and very like it. This book is suit for persons who is not beginner in Flash. There are a lot tutorials, tips and tricks. The explanations are clear and without superfluous words. The disk includes files which help to understand the program. I am very pleased with this book.

Adobe Flash Pro CS4
$699.00
I have been a flash designer for 10 years. This product is wonderful if you know what you are doing. Take a look at some pieces of flash here: http://kerstinfossen.com/html/portfolio_flash.html

As a professional website designer and flash guru these products make sense. They get the job done.

I would suggest if you are buying these to do your research - see if this will meet your needs. All I can say as advice... it works great for me and this is my job! If you know what you are doing... it works!

Best,
Kerstin Fossen
Web IT Freelancer / Contractor
WEB DESIGN & PROGRAMMING | FLASH | CMS | SEO | PRINT | MAINTENANCE | and more!

http://www.kerstinfossen.com/
office: 612 - 234 - 4176

Adobe Flash CS4 Professional How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques
$24.99
By its nature this book is somewhat disjointed. It's OK as a starter for some very basic techniques but not great as a reference. It is not well indexed.

Adobe Flash Pro CS4 [Mac]
$699.00
I really wish I had never "upgraded"
Flash CS4 is slow and unstable. It crashes all the time.
I am a character animator. The new tween messed up the work flow I have used since Flash MX. You can still use the "classic" tween but it is clear Adobe does not want you to use them. The IK tool is useless. You can not use it with classic tweens, and the layers must be next to each other. As in if you have a character that has long hair (symbol on a layer) that goes behind the torso, you can not parent it to the head symbol with the torso symbol or neck symbol on a layer in between. Minor things like changing the keyboard shortcut from "Z" to "M" so irritating. It used to be that most short cuts for basic actions were the same between Adobe programs. Then there is the smooth and straighten tools. When drawing I smooth an d straighten constantly as I draw using Keyboard shortcuts assigned to hotkeys on my WACOM tablet. CS4 has a new smooth and straighten that opens a dialogue box and doesn't work any better. To use the old style smooth/straighten tools you have to be in the arrow tool, click on them on the tool pallet and can not assign hot keys to them. Now that Adobe bought Macromedia they have a monopoly on 2D graphics they seem determined to create slow bloated junk. Why Adobe didn't make the drawing tools work better, add something useful like and art brush and get rid of all the pork that eats up RAM and processor power I don't know. I have a nice quad core mac pro with 14 gigs of ram. It should run like a dream. But it sits there like a pile of...
I may have to save my pennies and move my animating over to toonboom but I will always have to have Adobe so I do hope they get there act together.