IMPORTANT: This title is no longer current and has been replaced by: Certified Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Designer Study Guide

Description: NOTE: THIS TITLE IS NOT A BEN FORTA BOOK. IT WAS WRITTEN BY OTHER AUTHORS AS PART OF A SERIES OF TITLES ON MACROMEDIA CERTIFICATION ORIGINALLY CREATED BY BEN FORTA. THIS PAGE AND THE ONLINE EXAM ARE BEING HOSTED AS A FAVOR TO THE AUTHORS AND MACROMEDIA PRESS. BEN FORTA CANNOT SUPPORT THIS TITLE, AND TAKES NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE ACCURACY OF CONTENT IN IT, BUT WILL POST ERRATA HERE AS A SERVICE TO READERS.

With such widespread knowledge and use of the Macromedia Web tools, it makes sense to offer a certification exam to ensure Web designers are confident and competent with these tools. This method will also help the many people who now style themselves as Web design experts. Macromedia Flash MX, one of the most widely used tools for creating Web sites and applications, is a good candidate for a certification test.

The development of the Flash certification exam naturally led to a companion Study Guide. Even Flash experts don't use every feature of the product or tackle every Web site design problem every day, and thus will want to spend some time reviewing before the exam. The content of this Study Guide will not only help you assure yourself that you're well versed in Flash and related technologies for Web site design, but also ready to move on to the certification process.

The approach of the Flash MX Study Guide is first to examine the overall Flash product and the tasks designers carry out with it, then delve into the details. In this book you won't find an exhaustive study of every Flash feature or every client-side Web technology. You also won't find lots of tutorials and lengthy code examples. What you will find is a concise summary of Flash's salient features, arranged in order of increasing complexity, along with figures and examples that help demonstrate key points that a professional Flash designer should understand. You can learn how to use Flash from this book, but the idea is to reinforce and complement your knowledge with a summary of the features and capabilities.

As you read through the book, you may be tempted to skip certain chapters. But while you may feel confident that you know all about a particular subject, you will find many tips and notes, as well as helpful information on limitations, of which you may not be aware. These could crop up in the certification test, so we recommend that you start from the beginning and take the time to study the pages in order. Of course, you can jump about all you want, but you should skim each chapter for important points (tips, cautions, and notes) before taking the test.

We hope you find this book useful, encapsulating as it does a wide variety of information in a succinct format. Good luck on the certification test!

Chapter listing:

• - Introduction
• 1 - Page and Interface Layout
• 2 - Flash Architecture
• 3 - Flash Building Blocks
• 4 - Using Type
• 5 - Using Color
• 6 - Tools
• 7 - Buttons
• 8 - Motion Design
• 9 - Introduction to ActionScript
• 10 - Events
• 11 - Variables
• 12 - Functions
• 13 - Objects
• 14 - Methods
• 15 - Sound
• 16 - File Size Optimization
• Appendix - Answers

• Click here to take the sample exam.

• November 21, 2002 - Original printing