Adobe Edge Animate: The Missing Manual – #bookreview

Adobe Edge Animate: The Missing Manual
Chris Grover
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

Chris Grover’s well-written and updated new book shows you how to build animated HTML 5 graphics for the iPhone, the iPad, and the Web, using familiar Adobe features. By the sixth page of the first chapter, you are using the software to begin creating your first animation.

The previous edition of this book, covering Adobe Edge Animate Preview 7, was released just two months ago, shortly before Adobe released the 1.0 commercial version of its Edge Animate product. This new edition has been updated and expanded to cover the commercial version.

Prior to the 1.0 release, seven Preview versions of Adobe Edge Animate had been issued as free downloads, and user feedback was gathered so the product could be enhanced and expanded.

Here is what I reported about this book’s Preview 7 edition in an  October, 2012, review:

First, this book can help you get started with the 1.0 commercial version of Adobe Edge Animate. Second, O’Reilly will soon bring out an Adobe Edge Animate “Missing Manual” that covers the new commercial release. And, third, sources at O’Reilly tell me that readers who purchase this Preview 7 edition of Chris Grover’s book will get access to “the e-book version of Adobe Edge Animate the 1.0 version and all of its updates.”

The new edition of Adobe Edge Animate: The Missing Manual has ten chapters organized into five parts, even though page xiv of the paperback version states that the book is “divided into three parts.” (It then lists four parts, instead of  five, or three).  The new part in this edition is titled “Publishing Animate Compositions” and focuses on “Publishing Responsive Web Pages” that will look good “in web browsers of all shapes and sizes….” Here are the new edition’s parts and chapters:

Part One:Working with the Stage

• Chapter 1: Introducing Adobe Edge Animate
• Chapter 2: Creating and Animating Art
• Chapter 3: Adding and Formatting Text

Part Two: Animation with Edge Animate

• Chapter 4: Learning Timeline and Transition Techniques
• Chapter 5: Triggering Actions
• Chapter 6: Working Smart with Symbols

Part Three: Edge Animate with HTML 5 and JavaScript

• Chapter 7: Working with Basic HTML and CSS
• Chapter 8: Controlling Your Animations with JavaScript and jQuery
• Chapter 9: Helpful JavaScript Tricks

Part Four: Publishing Your Composition

• Chapter 10: Publishing Responsive Web Pages

Part Five: Appendixes

• Appendix A: Installation and Help
• Appendix B: Menu by Menu

Where keystrokes are appropriate, Chris Grover lists both and does not make you have to translate between systems, as some how-to manuals do.

“Animate works almost precisely the same in its Macintosh and Windows versions,” he assures. “Every button in every dialog box is exactly the same; the software response to ever command is identical. In this book, the illustrations have been given even-handed treatment, rotating between the two operating systems where Animate is at home (Windows 7 and Mac OS X).”

– Si Dunn

For more information: (O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)

Programming C# 5.0 – Excellent how-to guide for experienced developers ready to learn C# – #bookreview

Programming C# 5.0
Ian Griffiths
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

Ian Griffiths’ new book is for “experienced developers,” not for beginners hoping to learn the basics of programming while also learning C#. The focus is “Building Windows 8, Web, and Desktop Applications for the .NET 4.5 Framework.”

Earlier editions in the Programming C# series have “explained some basic concepts such as classes, polymorphism, and collections,” Griffiths notes. But C# also keeps growing in power and size, which means the page counts of its how-to manuals must keep growing, too, to cover “everything.”

The paperback version of Programming C# 5.0 weighs in at 861 pages and more than three pounds. So Griffiths’ choice to sharpen the book’s focus is a smart one. Beginners can learn the basics of programming in other books and other ways before digging into this edition. And experienced developers will find that the author’s explanations and code examples now have space to go “into rather more detail” than would have been possible if chapters explaining the basics of programming had been packed in, as well.

If you have done some programming and know a class from an array, this book can be your well-structured guide to learning C#. The “basics” are gone, but you still are shown how to create a “Hello World” program—primarily so you can see how new C# projects are created in Visual Studio, Microsoft’s development environment.

C# has been around since 2000 and “can be used for many kinds of applications, including websites, desktop applications, games, phone apps, and command-line utilities,” Griffiths says.

“The most significant new feature in C# 5.0,” he emphasizes, “is support for asynchronous programming.” He notes that “.NET has always offered asynchronous APIs (i.e., ones that do not wait for the operation they perform to finish before returning). Asynchrony is particularly important with input/output(I/O) operations, which can take a long time and often don’t require any active involvement from the CPU except at the start and end of an operation. Simple, synchronous APIs that do not return until the operation completes can be inefficient. They tie up a thread while waiting, which can cause suboptimal performance in servers, and they’re also unhelpful in client-side code, where they can make a user interface unresponsive.”

In the past, however, “the more efficient and flexible asynchronous APIs” have been “considerably harder to use than their synchronous counterparts. But now,” Griffiths points out, “if an asynchronous API conforms to a certain pattern, you can write C# code that looks almost as simple as the synchronous alternative would.”

If you are an experienced programmer hoping to add C# to your language skills, Ian Griffiths’ new book covers much of what you need to know, including how to use XAML (pronounced “zammel”) “to create  applications of the [touch-screen] style introduced by Windows 8” but also applications for desktop computers and Windows Phone.

Yes, Microsoft created C#, but there are other ways to run it, too, Griffiths adds.

“The open source Mono project (http://www.mono-project.com/) provides tools for building C# applications that run on Linux, Mac OS X, iOS, and Android.”

– Si Dunn

For more information:  paperback – Kindle

Specificity, Selectors, and the Cascade: Applying CSS3 to Documents – #bookreview

Selectors, Specificity, and the Cascade: Applying CSS3 to Documents
Eric A. Meyer
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

If you know some basic CSS but wonder how the “cascade” part of Cascading Style Sheets works, here is a useful guide.

Actually, this is a 73-page, two-chapter excerpt from the upcoming fourth edition of Eric A. Meyer’s CSS: The Definitive Guide. If you are learning CSS, dealing with CSS issues, or moving to CSS3, this small book can provide you with numerous how-to examples to apply to right now.

The first chapter focuses on “Selectors.” Selectors are not clearly defined at the beginning. But they generally are described elsewhere as “patterns” that can be used to select the element or elements you want to style in a document, such as headings of a certain font sizes or paragraphs with text in specific colors.

Fortunately, the first chapter’s code examples, descriptive paragraphs, and illustrations quickly clarify how to put selectors to work in a document. “[D]ocument structure and CSS selectors allow you to apply a wide variety of style to elements,” the author notes.

The second chapter’s topics are “Specificity and the Cascade.” And the initial technical definitions get a bit dense. For example: “When determining which values should apply to an element, a user agent must consider not only inheritance but also the specificity of the declaration, as well as the origin of the declarations themselves. The process of consideration is what’s known as the cascade.”

Uh, okay.

Once again, fortunately, the second chapter’s code samples, illustrations, and follow-up paragraphs quickly clarify what is going on. And they enable you to learn by doing, seeing the outcome, and applying what you’ve learned to documents of your own.

– Si Dunn

Programming Google App Engine, 2nd Edition – An important how-to guide, updated – #programming #bookreview

Programming Google App Engine, 2^nd Edition
Dan Sanderson
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

O’Reilly recently has published a new edition of Dan Sanderson’s Programing Google App Engine.  The new edition updates the 2009 first edition and includes coverage of Java 6 and Python 2.7 support, multithreading, asynchronous service APIs, and using frameworks such as webapp2 and Django 1.3. (“App Engine does not yet support Python 3,” Sanderson notes.)

The 509-page, 20-chapter book shows how “to develop applications that run on Google App Engine, and how to get the most out of the scalable model. A significant portion of the book discusses the App Engine scalable datastore, which does not behave like the relational databases that have been a staple of web development for the past decade,” the author states.

Sanderson is a technical writer and software engineer at Google, Inc. His new edition is well-written and appropriately illustrated with code samples, diagrams, screen shots and other graphics.

With clear steps and good detail, the book shows you first how to install and use the Python or Java SDKs on Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows machines and how to develop simple Python and Java applications. From there, it expands deeper into the how-to aspects of programming the Google App Engine.

In some chapters, the Python and Java options are presented together. Python’s and Java’s data modeling libraries, however, are discussed in separate chapters.

“Google App Engine, Google’s application hosting service, does more than just provide access to hardware,” Sanderson points out.

“It provides a model for building applications that grow automatically. App Engine runs your application so that each user to accesses it gets the same experience as every other user, whether there are dozens of simultaneous users or thousands. The application uses the same large-scale services that power Google’s applications for data storage and retrieval, caching, and network access. App Engine takes care of the tasks of large-scale computing, such as load balancing, data replication, and fault tolerance, automatically.”

Programming Google App Engine, 2^nd Edition can take you from asking “What is Google App Engine?” to well down the road toward becoming an App Engine expert.

– Si Dunn

For more information: paperback – Kindle

Big Data Book Blast: Hadoop, Hive…and Python??? – #programming #bookreview

Big Data is hothotHOT. And O’Reilly recently has added three new books of potential interest to Big Data workers, as well as those hoping to join their ranks.

Hadoop, Hive and–surprise!—Python are just a few of the hot tools you may encounter in the rapidly expanding sea of data now being gathered, explored, stored, and manipulated by companies, organizations, institutions, governments, and individuals around the planet. Here are the books:

Hadoop Operations
Eric Sammer
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

“Companies are storing more data from more sources in more formats than ever before,” writes Eric Sammer, a Hadoop expert who is principal solution architect at Cloudera. But gathering and stockpiling data is only “one half of the equation,” he adds. “Processing that data to produce information is fundamental to the daily operations of every modern business.”

Enter Apache Hadoop, a “pragmatic, cost-effective, scalable infrastructure” that increasingly is being used to develop Big Data applications for storing and processing information.

“Made up of a distributed filesystem called the Hadoop Distributed Filesystem (HDFS) and a computation layer that implements a processing paradigm called MapReduce, Hadoop is an open source, batch data processing system for enormous amounts of data. We live in a flawed world, and Hadoop is designed to survive in it by not only tolerating hardware and software failures, but also treating them as first-class conditions that happen regularly.”

Sammer adds: “Hadoop uses a cluster of plain old commodity servers with no specialized hardware or network infrastructure to form a single, logical, storage and compute platform, or cluster, that can be shared by multiple individuals or groups. Computation in Hadoop MapReduce is performed in parallel, automatically, with a simple abstraction for developers that obviates complex synchronization and network programming. Unlike many other distributed data processing systems, Hadoop runs the user-provided processing logic on the machine where the data lives rather than dragging the data across the network; a huge win for performance.”

Sammer’s new, 282-page book is well written and focuses on running Hadoop in production, including planning its use, installing it, configuring the system and providing ongoing maintenance. He also shows “what works, as demonstrated in crucial deployments.”

If you’re new to Hadoop or still getting a handle on it, you need Hadoop Operations. And even if you’re now an “old” hand at Hadoop, you likely can learn new things from this book. “It’s an extremely exciting time to get into Apache Hadoop,” Sammer states.

Programming Hive
Eric Capriolo, Dean Wampler, and Jason Rutherglen
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

“Hive,” the three authors point out, “provides an SQL dialect, called Hive Query Language (abbreviated HiveQL or just HQL), for querying data stored in a Hadoop cluster.”

They add: “Hive is most suited for data warehouse applications, where relatively static data is analyzed, fast response times are not required, and when data is not changing rapidly.”

Their well-structured and well-written book shows how to install and test Hadoop and Hive on a personal workstation – “a convenient way to learn and experiment with Hadoop.” Then it shows “how to configure Hive for use on Hadoop clusters.”

They also provide a brief overview of Hadoop and MapReduce before diving into Hive’s command-line interface (CLI) and introductory aspects such as how to embed lines of comments in Hive v0.80 and later.

From there, the book flows smoothly into HiveQL and how to use its SQL dialect to query, summarize, and analyze large datasets that Hadoop has stored in its distributed filesystem.

User documentation for Hive and Hadoop has been sparse, so Programming Hive definitely fills a solid need. Significantly, the final chapter presents several “Case Study Examples from the User Trenches” where real companies explain how they have used Hive to solve some very challenging problems involving Big Data.

Python for Data Analysis
Wes McKinney
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

No, Python is not the first language many people think of when picturing large data analysis projects. For one thing, it’s an interpreted language, so Python code runs a lot slower than code written in compiled programming languages such as C++ or Java.

Also, the author concedes, “Python is not an ideal language for highly concurrent, multithreaded applications, particularly applications with many CPU-bound threads.” The software’s global interpreter lock (GIL) “prevents the interpreter from executing more than one Python bytecode instruction at a time.”

Thus, Python will not soon be challenging Hadoop to a Big Data petabyte speed duel.

On the other hand, Python is reasonably easy to learn, and it has strong and widespread support within the scientific and academic communities, where a lot of data must get crunched at a reasonable clip, if not at blinding speed.

And Wes McKinney is the main author of pandas, Python’s increasingly popular open source library for data analysis. It (pandas) is “designed to make working with structured data fast, easy, and expressive.”

His book makes a good case for using Python in at least some Big Data situations. “In recent years,” he states, “Python’s improved library support (primarily pandas) has made it a strong alternative for data manipulation tasks. Combined with Python’s strength in general purpose programming, it is an excellent choice as a single language for building data-centric applications.”

Much of this well-written, well-illustrated book “focuses on high-performance array-based computing tools for working with large data sets.” It uses a case-study-examples approach to demonstrate how to tackle a wide range of data analysis problems, using Python libraries that include pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, and IPython, “the component in the standard scientific Python toolset that ties everything together.”

By the way, if you have never programmed in Python, check out the end of McKinney’s book. An appendix titled “Python Language Essentials” gives a good overview of the language, with a specific bias toward “processing and manipulating structured and unstructured data.”

If you do scientific, academic, or business computing and need to crunch and visualize a lot of data, definitely check out Python for Data Analysis.

You may be pleasantly surprised at how well and how easily Python and its data-analysis libraries can do the job.

– Si Dunn

R in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition – A welcome update to an excellent reference guide – #programming #bookreview

R in a Nutshell: 2^nd Edition
Joseph Adler
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

Attention, statisticians, data scientists, data journalists, mathematicians, graphics specialists, and others who use the R programming language.  Joseph Adler has updated his popular “desktop quick reference guide” to R.

If you aren’t familiar with R, it is a “free software environment for statistical computing and graphics,” according to the R-Project website.  Some of the world’s biggest corporations and news organizations are now using R. But there also are numerous ways individual users can work with R, including using it inside Microsoft Excel by running RExcel.

The new edition offers some nice improvements over the 2009 first edition, but it is not a full-scale rewrite.  After all, R itself generally doesn’t change much from one release to the next.

Here’s what is new in the new edition:

• New information on ggplot2 and using R with Hadoop.
• Formatting changes to make the code examples easier to read.
• Plotting chapters have been grouped together.
• “Minor updates.” These “reflect changes in R 2.14 and R 2.15.
• New sections offering how-to information on “useful tools for manipulating data in R , such as plyr and reshape.

The author says that while his 699-page book “is designed to be a concise guide to R,” it is “not intended to be a book about statistics or an exhaustive guide to R.”

Chapter 3, however, provides a friendly “short R tutorial” with plenty of basic examples.  And Chapter 5 presents a helpful “Overview of the R Language.” The book’s other chapters are packed with code examples, illustrations, and well-written explanations, as well.

R in a Nutshell’s chapters are organized into six parts:

• Part I – R Basics
• Part II – The R Language
• Part III – Working with Data
• Part IV – Data Visualization
• Part V – Statistics with R
• Part VI – Additional Topics (including using r with Hadoop)  

Whether you are: (1)  new to R, (2) trying to land a job where R skills are required, (3) working on projects that could benefit from R’s excellent statistical and graphics capabilities, or (4) an old hand at R, you should have this updated “desktop quick reference” manual on hand.

– Si Dunn

For more information:  paperback – Kindle

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought – #programming #bookreview

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought
Drew Neil
(Pragmatic Bookshelf, paperback)

Vim is a popular, free text editor used by programmers, web developers, and others. If you are a reasonably good touch typist and know just two commands, i and :w, you can create simple code files and text files in a hurry. For serious Vim users, however, there is a fairly long learning curve that includes a large array of features and configurable settings.

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought is for Vim users who have been through the basic tutorial offered through the program and now want to step up their skills.

The book focuses on “the core functionality of the editor…[m]aster Vim’s core, and you’ll gain portable access to a text editing power tool,” author Drew Neil promises.

Neil has structured his content as “a recipe book. It’s not designed to be read from start to finish.”

Instead, Practical Vim follows its opening chapter, “The Vim Way,” with 20 additional chapters separated into six parts:

• Part 1 – Modes (Normal, Insert, Visual, Command Line)
• Part 2 – Files (Manage Multiple Files, Open Files and Save Them to Disk)
• Part 3 – Getting Around Faster (Navigate Inside Files with Motions, Navigate Between Files with Jumps)
• Part 4 – Registers (Copy and Paste, Macros)
• Part 5 – Patterns (Matching Patterns and Literals, Search, Substitution, Global Commands)
• Part 6 – Tools (Index and Navigate Source Code with ctags; Compile Code and Navigate Errors with the Quickfix List; Search Project-Wide with grep, vimgrep, and Others; Dial X for Autocompletion; Find and Fix Typos with Vim’s Spell Checker; Now What?

There is one appendix, and its focus is: Customize Vim to Suit Your Preferences.

The book is well written, and it provides numerous how-to steps, illustrated sequences of commands, tips, explanations, and suggestions.

If you are a Vim novice and serious about getting good at using the program, Drew Neil’s Practical Vim can show you how to do it.

– Si Dunn

Practical Vim: Edit Text at the Speed of Thought

For more information:  paperback

Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion – Working with the Terminal and Shell – #bookreview

Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

 When I showed this book–and its “Going Deep with the Terminal and Shell”–tagline to my Mac-centric wife, her first response was: “Why?”

Her Macintosh, she declared, already does everything she needs it to do, with no fuss. Why bother with terminals and shells–and Unix?

I, on the other hand, started working with computers back in the days when everything was done at the command line, programs and data were stored on recording tape, and 48K of RAM was stunning state of the art.

So I am happy with Dave Taylor’s observation in his new book that “there are over a thousand Unix commands included with OS X—and you can’t see most of them without accessing the command line. From sophisticated software development environments to web browsers, file transfer utilities to encryption and compression utilities, almost everything you can do in the Aqua interface—and more—can be done with a few carefully chosen Unix commands.”

Indeed, he notes, “…dipping into the primarily text-based Unix tools on your OS X system gives you more power and control over both your computer and your computing environment.”

He lists some other, enticing reasons to learn and use the Unix tools available in OS X. There are, for example, “thousands of open source and otherwise freely downloadable Unix applications,” including the GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) that is a convenient and affordable alternative to Adobe Photoshop.

“Fundamentally,” he says, “Unix is all about power and control.”

My wife is still not convinced having this power and control is necessary or important to  how she uses her Mac. But I predict many others will want to get this book.

It is an excellent how-to guide, with 214 pages organized into 10 chapters:

• 1. Why Use Unix?
• 2. Using the Terminal’
• 3. Exploring the File System
• 4. File Management
• 5. Finding Files and Information
• 6. Redirecting I/O
• 7. Multitasking
• 8. Taking Unix Online
• 9. Of Windows and X11
• 10. Where to Go from Here

Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion is well written and nicely illustrated with step-by-step Unix command examples, results displays, screen shots, and tips. It doesn’t try to cover everything, nor get too deep into detail.

Dave Taylor’s new book comfortably meets its goal of showing savvy OS X users how to use “all the basic commands you need to get started with Unix.”

There is, he points out, “a whole world of Unix inside your OS X system, and it’s time for you to jump in and learn how to be more productive and more efficient, and gain remarkable power as a Mac user.”

– Si Dunn

Learning Unix for OS X Mountain Lion
For more information: paperback – Kindle

Learning Node – A good how-to guide for server-side Web development with Node.js – #programming #bookreview

Learning Node
Shelley Powers
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

 “Node is designed to be used for [server-side] applications that are heavy on input/output (I/O), but light on computation,” veteran Web technology author Shelley Powers notes in Learning Node, her ninth and newest how-to book from O’Reilly.

“Node.js,” she explains, “is a server-side technology that’s based on Google’s V8 JavaScript engine. It’s a highly scalable system that uses asynchronous, event-driven I/O (input/output), rather than threads or separate processes. “It’s ideal for web applications that are frequently accessed but computationally simple.”

I’ve criticized some previous Node books (1) for assuming that all of their readers know a lot about Node.js and assorted programming languages and (2) for not giving enough step-by-step installation and start-up information.

Happily, Learning Node is well written, nicely illustrated with code samples and screen shots, and assumes only that you have some working familiarity with JavaScript. It gives a detailed overview of how to set up development environments in Linux (Ubuntu) and Windows 7. “Installation on a Mac should be similar to installation on Linux,” the author adds.

One caveat regarding code examples: “Most were tested in a Linux environment, but should work, as is, in any Node environment.”

The 374-page book has 16 chapters. The first five “cover both getting Node and the package manager (npm) installed , how to use them, creating your first applications, and utilizing modules.”

Shelley Powers notes that she incorporates “the use of the Express framework, which also utilizes the Connect middleware, throughout the book.” So if you have little or no experience with Express, you will need to pay attention to chapters 6 through 8. But: “After these foundation chapters, you can skip around a bit,” she adds.

Some of the additional chapters cover key/value pairs, using MongoDb with Node, and working with Node’s relational database bindings.

Two chapters get into specialized application use. “Chapter 12 focuses purely on graphics and media access, including how to provide media for the new HTML5 video element, as well as working with PDF documents and Canvas,” the author points out. “Chapter 13 covers the very popular Sockets.io module, especially for working with the new web socket functionality.”

The final chapters are crucial, particularly if you want to move from learning Node to working in a production environment. Chapter 14 covers “Testing and Debugging Node Applications.” Chapter 15 “covers issues of security and authority…it is essential that you spend time in this chapter before you roll a Node application out for general use.”

Meanwhile, Chapter 16 describes “how to prepare your application for production use, including how to deploy your Node application not only on your own system , but also in one of the cloud servers that are popping up to host Node applications.”

Learning Node is both an excellent overall introduction to Node.js and a how-to reference guide that you will want to keep close at hand as you develop and deploy Node applications.

– Si Dunn

For more information: Node.js, paperback, Kindle

Adobe Edge Animate Preview 7: The Missing Manual – #bookreview #html5 #animation

Adobe Edge Animate Preview 7: The Missing Manual
Chris Grover
(O’Reilly, paperback – Kindle)

Chris Glover’s well-written new book shows you how to build animated HTML 5 graphics for the iPhone, the iPad, and the Web, using familiar Adobe features. By the sixth page of the first chapter, you are using the software to create your first animation.

The only problem is,Adobe released the 1.0 commercial version of its Edge Animate product on Sept. 24, 2012, very soon after this Preview 7 book was published.

And, for a limited time, Adobe was offering Edge Animate 1.0 free with a new membership in Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

Prior to the 1.0 release, seven Preview versions of Adobe Edge Animate were released as free downloads, and user feedback was gathered so the product could be enhanced and expanded.

Preview 7 was released about five weeks prior to the appearance of new 1.0 commercial version. And this book was created to fill a gap that was expected to remain open longer.

Here’s the good news – three items of good news, actually.

First, this book can help you get started with the 1.0 commercial version of Adobe Edge Animate. Second, O’Reilly will soon bring out an Adobe Edge Animate “Missing Manual” that covers the new commercial release. And, third, sources at O’Reilly tell me that readers who purchase this Preview 7 edition of Chris Grover’s book will get access to “the e-book version of Adobe Edge Animate the 1.0 version and all of its updates.”

Adobe Edge Animate Preview 7: The Missing Manual has nine chapters organized into four parts:

Part One:Working with the Stage

• Chapter 1: Introducing Adobe Edge Animate
• Chapter 2: Creating and Animating Art
• Chapter 3: Adding and Formatting Text

Part Two: Animation with Edge Animate

• Chapter 4: Learning Timeline and Transition Techniques
• Chapter 5: Triggering Actions
• Chapter 6: Working Smart with Symbols

Part Three: Edge Animate with HTML 5 and JavaScript

• Chapter 7: Working with Basic HTML and CSS
• Chapter 8: Controlling Your Animations with JavaScript and jQuery
• Chapter 9: Helpful JavaScript Tricks

Part Four: Appendixes

• Appendix A: Installation and Help
• Appendix B: Menu by Menu
• Where keystrokes are appropriate, Chris Grover lists both and does not make you have to translate between systems, as some how-to manuals do.

“Animate works almost precisely the same in its Macintosh and Windows versions,” he assures. “Every button in every dialog box is exactly the same; the software response to ever command is identical. In this book, the illustrations have been given even-handed treatment, rotating between the two operating systems where Animate is at home (Windows 7 and Mac OS X).”

 

– Si Dunn

For more information: (O’Reilly, paperback, Kindle)