Adobe Flash has many uses....animations, web sites, components, video playback, RIA, etc. One of the really cool things Flash is good at with the introduction of ActionScript 3.0 and some cool new features of Flash CS3 and CS4 is Image Effects.
Image Effects range from shapes, filters, pixel manipulation, movement, and 3D animation. There are lots of Flash books on the market now that cover many things, but this is the first book I've seen that focuses primarily on that topic. You would think that there would not be enough topics to fill an entire book, but you would be wrong.
The author (Todd Yard) discusses every aspect of this topic from the drawing API, filter and blend modes, bitmaps, bender and shaders, 3d animation, text and video effects and much more.
The audience of this book (as stated by the author) is anybody you has familiarity of Flash and ActionScript. So if you have some experience using Flash (a recent version) then you should be fine.
Of course if you have an artistic background (which I'm guessing most readers of this book will have) it will help even more as well as a knack for programming.
That being said, the author explains each topic succinctly with very easy to comprehend examples in each chapter. The author never assumes anything from the reader and explains exactly what he means with sufficient explanations. Since there are so many topics and sub-topics within this book, it could be easy to get lost as you read from beginning to end, but the author makes sure you are guided in the right direction and reviews what has been covered before briefly to make sure the author and reader are on the same page.
Since the topics can get rather technical and verbose, the author has mini-examples that he builds upon each chapter so you can get an idea what each section can be used with and how it could be used with your existing flash projects.
One of the most interesting chapters in this book (Chaper 6) covers 3d animation which is covered with objects of Vector3D and Matrix3D and really makes it look so interesting compared to regular 2d animation. Another really interesting chapter (Chapter 10) is video effects. The author talks about the cool things you can do with video and flash on the web. Flash is the standard with playing and manipulating video on the web and the author goes through cool examples such as building a video loader, filtering video frames, adding effect to specific frames, isolating colors, highlighting colors for a comic book effect, and so forth. This topic alone will really inspire to learn more about flash and effects.
I could go on and on but you need to read the book yourself! It's a great book for anybody who really wants to understand why and how you can perform all kinds of image effects in flash.