While I appreciate the relatively quick pace of "Flash CS4 All in One for Dummies", I can't agree with its description as being useful for both those completely new to flash as well as seasoned vets. It seems to fall squarely in the middle of those two groups much of the time, but then careens widely in either direction at the strangest times. The book is broken up into "sub" books, and the authors make it clear that the overall book should be treated as a reference guide and less as a straight read; this alone makes it a pretty tough read for someone completely new to Flash, but it also seems to make the strangest assumptions about what a new user would likely know and then one section later it spends multiple pages on information that isn't even specific to the Adobe Suite, nevertheless to Flash.
Most of the useful "what has changed with Flash" information is hidden throughout the book, so if you're familiar with a recent version of Flash, this isn't much of a helpful manual either. I was coming from a professional working knowledge of the rest of the Adobe Suite, but was years out of touch with Flash, so the book's mostly middle ground approach to CS4 was useful to me. However, I still felt like the presentation order of topics was unhelpful, and trying to read through the book quickly resulted in having to skip pages just as frequently as I had to go back a few pages wondering if I'd missed something.
There seemed to be a minimum amount of confusing typos, but honestly, the 3 or 4 I found that actually mixed up labels or broke code are really 3 or 4 too many for a "beginner's" guide. Also, the default layout and available windows in Flash tended to be different than what the Author's assumed they would be, so there are a few places of confusion that result from that.
All in all I found this book useful for what I needed to do, which was jump a big gap of missing knowledge of Flash, but I'm not sure how many others are looking for this book to do only that.
