Flash on Devices book review
Here’s a quick review of the book “AdvancED Flash on Devices” by Elad Elrom, Scott Janousek and Thomas Joos, published at Friends of ED. In a nutshell, if you work with Flash and mobile, you must buy it.
For the past few months I’ve been working on a Flash Lite project, and 3 months ago I acquired a copy of AdvancED Flash On Devices. Before this book my main point of reference for any questions on the Flash Lite ecosystem was random mutterings here and there on various Flash blogs, or the constantly changing and always over cluttered Adobe pages. To be frank though, very few people seem to talk about Flash Lite at all, including Adobe.
Topics on Flash Lite in the book include details on devices which run Flash Lite, different versions of Flash Lite and their differences, quirks and bugs, framworks others have made, third party tools and more. The only thing it won’t tell you is how to code Flash Lite apps in any detail, but there are already plenty of books on Flash and Actionscript 2, and the classes available on Flash Lite are well covered in Adobe’s technical documentation.
Importantly there are also chapters on the future for Flash on Mobile, including getting Flash apps onto the iPhone and Flash 10 for mobile.
Since development of Flash Lite has stopped, you can also be sure that this book contains a summary of Flash Lite as it ended, and therefore will not go out of date (although you will have to know to ignore any 3.1 information). If you find yourself working on a Flash Lite project a year from now targeting devices which aren’t compatible with the new Flash 10 for mobile, this book should still serve you as well as it does today.
An essential purchase for anyone looking for a comprehensive overview of the complex world of Flash on mobile.
