IMPORTANT: This title is no longer current and has been replaced by: Certified Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Developer Study Guide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 developers are confident and competent with these tools. This method will also help the many people who now style themselves as multimedia development experts. Macromedia Flash MX, one of the most widely used tools for creating dynamic content and custom 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 development 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 product development, 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 developers carry out with it, and then delve into the details. In this book you will not find an exhaustive study of every Flash feature or every method and argument available. 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 that a professional Flash developer should understand. You can learn how to use Macromedia ActionScript from this book (short code samples are provided), but the idea is to reinforce and complement your knowledge with a summary of its 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 Flash's 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 - Flash Movie Structure
• 2 - Targeting Objects and Variables
• 3 - Identifiers and Naming Conventions
• 4 - Understanding Variables
• 5 - Understanding Functions
• 6 - Control Structures
• 7 - Introduction of Objects
• 8 - Object Types
• 9 - Rich Media
• 10 - Flash Event Model
• 11 - UI Components
• 12 - Communicating with the Host Application
• 13 - Printing
• 14 - Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming
• 15 - Properties and Methods
• 16 - Classes and Inheritance
• 17 - Including Dynamic Data
• 18 - Working with XML and the DOM
• 19 - Pushing Data with the XML Socket
• 20 - Flash Remoting
• 21 - Identifying the Environment
• 22 - Identifying Methods for Functional Testing
• 23 - Identifying Methods for Usability Testing
• 24 - Accessibility
• Appendix - Answers

• Click here to take the sample exam.