Macromedia Director 8.5 provides an exciting environment for composing interactive, attractive and media rich movies suitable for the web. Starting with an introduction to the development environment, Fiaz Hussain presents a quick and effective guide to the powerful components that make up Macromedia Director 8.5. Using a hands-on approach, with plenty of illustrations, Essential Director 8.5 fast:- Introduces the panels, windows and tools required for producing attractive and informative movies - Explains the role of casts and sprites in making appealing movies - Shows various ways of designing, developing and publishing animations - Demonstrates how different media types can be integrated to create lively movies - Illustrates the use of behaviours to add interactivity and dynamism in movies - Provides a quick guide to producing Shockwave movies suitable for web delivery Essential Director 8.5 fast gives an easy explanation of the basic tools needed to create dazzling entertainment, interactive product demonstrations and learning applications suitable for corporate web sites. Examples used in the book can be found in the accompanying Essential series web site http://www.essential-series.com

Macromedia Dreamweaver 4.0 provides an exciting environment for creating and managing web pages and web sites. Fiaz Hussain gives a quick, but effective, introduction to the various key components and tools making up the development studio. Using a hands-on approach, with plenty of animated illustrations, Essential Dreamweaver 4.0 fast:- shows the simple and valuable steps necessary to design, develop, evaluate and publish a web site;- explains the essential components of building a web-site, through hand-coding HTML or JavaScript, or via the Visual Editor, or by means of both; - discusses how to include text, images, links, forms, frames, layers, HTML, JavaScript and style sheets. Essential Dreamweaver 4.0 fast gives an easy explanation of the basic tools needed to build and manage sophisticated web sites quickly. The source code for the examples in the book is available from the Essential Series web site: http://www.essential-series.com

Create imaginative and lively animation for the web with Essential Flash 5.0 fast!The latest release of Macromedia's Flash, version 5.0, adds new features to the popular web applications software - such as enhanced colour controls, better selection highlights, draggable guides, pen tool, shared libraries, new panels, and expanded ActionScript capabilities. Essential Flash 5.0 fast provides a simple yet thorough introduction to the world of Flash. With clear and concise examples, Fiaz Hussain explains: - The Flash development environment- How to create simple and complex objects- Using the shape editing tools and colour- All about symbols and their instances- Layers and animation- Interactivity, including ActionScripting- How to optimise Flash movies for fast downloads