Review - Flash Applications for Mobile Devices

Title: Flash Applications for Mobile Devices
Publisher: friends Of ED (Dec. 2006)
Price: $49.99
Authors: Friends of Ed, Richard Legget, Weyerd de Boer, Scott Janousek

Snapshot:

Score: 9/10
Overview: Flash Applications for Mobile Devices is an excellent resource to add to your collection for Flash Lite development.

Pros:

• Covers 1.X and 2.X
• Teaches entire application life cycle from beginning to end
• Example code on almost every page
• Reference section

Cons:

• I don't know if this is a true "con" but the book is being released (has been rather) while Adobe is releasing the next gen of Actionscript - and this book only mentions it to say it won't cover it

About Product

See www.friendsofed.com

Learn how to

• The essentials of Flash lite 1.1 & 2.X
• How to create mobile applications and games
• Best practices to employ from outset to final deployment
• Integrating graphics, sound and video
• Consuming live data over HTTP

First Impressions

There is a whole lot of example code and it's a very "visual" learning environment.

Detailed Analysis

The book is laid out in 3 (4 really) sections. Part one: Getting started which gives a very thurough overview of basic Flash Lite development. Part two: Development goes into details of the different types of applications which can be developed along with integration techniques. Part three: Post development shows you everything you need to do to distrbute your application. Part 4 are appendix

Chapter 1 starts out with a history of Macromedia & Adobe and development for mobile devices as well as various other development technologies (RIAs for example). Continuing with the history lessons, the book next covers the history of mobile devices covering just about every detail which could possibly relate to mobile development (and then some).

Chapter 3 gives a brief detail on how to develop Flash Lite 1.1 applications while Chapter 4 does the same for Flash Lite 2.0.

Chapter 5 begins section 2 with an in depth look at application development covering all the basics of Flash Lite (both 1.1 & 2.X). It also gives an almost side by side comparison of a script written in 1.1 and the same script 2.X (each chapter from this point does the same thing actually).

Chapter 6 takes application development one step further into the world of gaming. This chapter is full of examples and sample code. It gives an overview of gaming basics and game development for mobile devices.

Chapter 7 steps into mobile entertainment development teaching how to develop screen savers, wallpaper and content. Chapters 8 and 9 discuss integration of sound and video respectively. It shows how to create a Flash Lite MP3 player and how to adapt videos to play on a mobile device. Chapter 10 finishes section 2 with different ways to extend Flash Lite. It discusses how to create components and write classes. It also shows how to create and save text files.

Chapter 11 discusses the different aspects for distributing your application. It teaches how to create an installer package as well as where to distribute your application from. Chapter 12 finishes the book with the future of Flash Lite and mobile development. It gives a little insight into the possibilites but also some of potential obsticles as well.

Part 4 of the book contains the appendixes which really round out this book. Almost like a small reference, it has a guide for error codes you may (and probably will) encounter, as well as a small reference to FSCommand2 commands. It finishes off with a glossary of terms used throughout the book.

Closing Thoughts / Summary

All in all, this is a great book, definately a resource you need if you want to get into mobile development, and if you're just starting out, you probably wouldn't need anything else for a while either.