[casual_games] Recommendations for a book on Flash games creation?

[Morbus Iff]

> Can anyone recommend a good intermediate-level book for making games in 

You're at a weird transitional point: with Flash 8 out, most of the 
Flash books are being replaced with the Latest and the Greatest. With 
that said, I was recommended FLASH MX 2004 GAME PROGRAMMING from Premier 
Press. BE FOREWARNED: There are so many errors in this damn tome that I 
swear to god, they had no money for copyeditors. Half the time, you're 
gonna doubt your comprehension of something, only to realize that the 
source text is idiotic.

You'll be able to catch them, I'm sure. A newb coder (ie. no previous 
experience) would probably run off crying. It's that flippin' bad.

As for online game programming: the book doesn't cover a lot of it. You 
can find a very healthy amount of PHP/Flash tutorials on the web, using 
either GET keypairs (&name=Morbus&score=1304) or XML. If you're looking 
for super uber real time, then you'd be looking at running your own 
socket game server (there are various free thingies running around - see 
gotoandplay.it for an example of a multi-tiered one).

Most of my knowledge (which is staying away from socket servers at the 
moment, since I don't need that much speed or consistency) relating to 
online stuff has been from a healthy history of web programming already. 
Otherwise, you'll probably be able to pick most of web/Flash integration 
from gotoandplay.it, kirupa.com, etc., etc.

-- 
Morbus Iff ( if i could change the future, i'd change the past instead )
Technical: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/779
Culture: http://www.disobey.com/ and http://www.gamegrene.com/
icq: 2927491 / aim: akaMorbus / yahoo: morbus_iff / jabber.org: morbus