Graphics & Multimedia Books - Page 4

ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers

Joey Lott, Darron Schall, Keith Peters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 33 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Well before Ajax and Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation hit the scene, Macromedia offered the first method for building web pages with the responsiveness and functionality of desktop programs with its Flash-based "Rich Internet Applications." Now, new owner Adobe is taking Flash and its powerful capabilities beyond the Web and making it a full-fledged development environment.

Rather than focus on theory, the ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook concentrates on the practical application of ActionScript, with more than 300 solutions you can use to solve a wide range of common coding dilemmas. You'll find recipes that show you how to: Detect the user's Flash Player version or their operating system Build custom classes Format dates and currency types Work with strings Build user interface components Work with audio and video Make remote procedure calls using Flash Remoting and web services Load, send, and search XML data And much, much more ...

Each code recipe presents the Problem, Solution, and Discussion of how you can use it in other ways or personalize it for your own needs, and why it works. You can quickly locate the recipe that most closely matches your situation and get the solution without reading the whole book to understand the underlying code. Solutions progress from short recipes for small problems to more complex scripts for thornier riddles, and the discussions offer a deeper analysis for resolving similar issues in the future, along with possible design choices and ramifications. You'll even learn how to link modular ActionScript pieces together to create rock-solid solutions for Flex 2 and Flash applications.

When you're not sure how ActionScript 3.0 works or howto approach a specific programming dilemma, you can simply pick up the book, flip to the relevant recipe(s), and quickly find the solution you're looking for.

Adobe Developer Library is a co-publishing partnership between O'Reilly Media and Adobe Systems, Inc. and is designed to produce the number one information resources for developers who use Adobe technologies. Created in 2006, the Adobe Developer Library is the official source for comprehensive learning solutions to help developers create expressive and interactive web applications that can reach virtually anyone on any platform. With top-notch books and innovative online resources covering the latest in rich Internet application development, the Adobe Developer Library offers expert training and in-depth resources, straight from the source.

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT-G Programming Guide (Technology in Action)

James Floyd Kelly

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The reader of this book will be someone looking for more detailed information on the NXT-G programming language used to program the LEGO Mindstorms NXT robotics kit.

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT-G Programming Guide is suitable for young programmers, age 10 and up, as well as parents and teachers who want to learn the new language for themselves or be able to assist students/children with learning to properly program their robots.

• Includes easy-to-follow examples for each and every programming block
• Provides programming techniques simple enough to be understood by young programmers, age 10 and up.
• Provides a test robot (with instructions) in the appendix for running the programs

What youll learn

• Understand the basics of computer programming.
• Easily program your robot with the NXT-G visual programming language.
• See how to implement basic, intermediate, and advanced programs.
• Learn how to program for
  • Moving
  • Waiting
  • Recording
  • Stopping
  • Displaying messages
  • Sending messages
  • Defining the duration of an activity
  • Creating random behavior
• Practice with a free sample program.

Who is this book for?

This book is for people new to programming (10 years old and up) or for experienced programmers new to the NXT-G programming language.

Learning Processing: A Beginner's Guide to Programming Images, Animation, and Interaction (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

Daniel Shiffman

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This book teaches you the basic building blocks of programming needed to create cutting-edge graphics applications including interactive art, live video processing, and data visualization. A unique lab-style manual, the book gives graphic and web designers, artists, and illustrators of all stripes a jumpstart on working with the Processing programming environment by providing instruction on the basic principles of the language, followed by careful explanations of select advanced techniques. Within these pages, ITP (Tisch School of the Arts, New York University) professor Daniel Shiffman demonstrates the fundamentals of programming that will expand your understanding of what is possible in the world of computer graphics. By travelling beyond the confines of proprietary software, you will be empowered to create your own custom design tools. * A friendly start-up guide to Processing, the visual artist s free, open-source alternative to expensive software and daunting programming languages. * No previous experience required this book is for the true programming beginner! * Step-by-step examples, thorough explanations, hands-on exercises, and simple code samples support your learning curve. Source code and supplemental tutorials are also available through an online companion site.

Programming WPF

Chris Sells, Ian Griffiths

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Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Microsoft -> Operating Systems -> Windows - General

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 55 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

If you want to build applications that take full advantage of Windows Vista's new user interface capabilities, you need to learn Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). This new edition, fully updated for the official release of .NET 3.0, is designed to get you up to speed on this technology quickly. By page 2, you'll be writing a simple WPF application. By the end of Chapter 1, you'll have taken a complete tour of WPF and its major elements.

WPF is the new presentation framework for Windows Vista that also works with Windows XP. It's a cornucopia of new technologies, which includes a new graphics engine that supports 3-D graphics, animation, and more; an XML-based markup language, called XAML, for declaring the structure of your Windows UI; and a radical new model for controls.

This second edition includes new chapters on printing, XPS, 3-D, navigation, text and documents, along with a new appendix that covers Microsoft's new WPF/E platform for delivering richer UI through standard web browsers -- much like Adobe Flash. Content from the first edition has been significantly expanded and modified. Programming WPF includes: Scores of C# and XAML examples that show you what it takes to get a WPF application up and running, from a simple "Hello, Avalon" program to a tic-tac-toe game Insightful discussions of the powerful new programming styles that WPF brings to Windows development, especially its new model for controls A color insert to better illustrate WPF support for 3-D, color, and other graphics effects A tutorial on XAML, the new HTML-like markup language for declaring Windows UI An explanation and comparison of the features that support interoperability withWindows Forms and other Windows legacy applications

WPF represents the best of the control-based Windows world and the content-based web world. Programming WPF helps you bring it all together.

Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects: Essential and Advanced Techniques, 4th Edition

Chris & Trish Meyer

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Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Trish and Chris Meyer share fifteen years of real-world film and video production experience inside the critically acclaimed Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects. More than a step-by-step review of the features in After Effects, you will learn how the program thinks so that you can realize your own visions more quickly and efficiently. This full-color book is jammed full of tips, gotchas, and sage advice that will help you survive whatever your next project throws at you.

Creating Motion Graphics 4th Edition has been heavily revised, reuniting the previous two volumes plus adding detailed coverage of new features introduced in After Effects 7 and CS3 Professional to form one massive, essential reference. The enclosed DVD-ROM contains source footage and project files for the numerous exercises which help reinforce each concept. The DVD also includes over 180 pages of additional information, including lengthy Bonus Chapters on
Expressions and Effects.

* Mastering animation through the use of keyframes, motion paths, and the Graph Editor

* Blending imagery using alpha channels, masks, mattes, modes, and stencils

* Building groups and hierarchies through parenting and nested comps

* Extended coverage of type animation, paint tools and 3D space

* Advanced subjects such as keying, motion tracking, expressions, and video issues

* Includes over 180 PDF pages of bonus content on the DVD

* Extensive coverage of the new CS3 features including the Shape and Puppet tools, Brainstorm, per-character 3D text, color management, and more!

Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!

Keith Peters

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In this book, you'll learn

• All the ActionScript 3.0 (including math and trigonometry functions) and Flash rendering techniques you'll need to start animating with code
• Basic motion principles such as velocity, acceleration, friction, easing, and bouncing
• How to handle user interaction via the keyboard and mouse
• Advanced motion techniques such as springs, coordinate rotation, conservation of momentum, and forward and inverse kinematics
• All the basic 3D concepts you need to do 3D in Flash, from simple perspective to full 3D solids complete with backface culling and dynamic lighting

Flash has long been one of the most approachable, user-friendly tools for creating web-based animations, games, and applications. This has contributed to making it one of the most widely used programs for creating interactive web content. With each new version of Flash, ActionScript, its built-in scripting language, has become more powerful and a little more complex, too. ActionScript, now at version 3.0, has significantly matured as a programming language, bringing power and speed only previously dreamed about to Flash-based animation, going far beyond traditionally used keyframes and tweens. The material inside this book covers everything you need to know to harness the power of ActionScript 3.0. First, all the basics of script-based animation and setting up an ActionScript 3.0 project are covered. An introduction to object-oriented programming follows, with the new syntax, events, and rendering techniques of ActionScript 3.0 explained, giving you the confidence to use the language, whether starting from scratch or moving up from ActionScript 2.0. The book goes on to provide information on all the relevant trigonometry you will need, before moving on to physics concepts such as acceleration, velocity, easing, springs, collision detection, conservation of momentum, 3D, and forward and inverse kinematics. In no time at all you'll both understand the concepts of scripted animation and have the ability to create all manner of exciting animations and games.

Summary of Contents

• PART ONE - ACTIONSCRIPTED ANIMATION BASICS
  • Chapter 1 Basic Animation Concepts
  • Chapter 2 Basics of ActionScript 3.0 for Animation
  • Chapter 3 Trigonometry for Animation
  • Chapter 4 Rendering Techniques
• PART TWO - BASIC MOTION
  • Chapter 5 Velocity and Acceleration
  • Chapter 6 Boundaries and Friction
  • Chapter 7 User Interaction: Moving Objects Around
• PART THREE - ADVANCED MOTION
  • Chapter 8 Easing and Springing
  • Chapter 9 Collision Detection
  • Chapter 10 Coordinate Rotation and Bouncing Off Angles
  • Chapter 11 Billiard Ball Physics
  • Chapter 12 Particle Attraction and Gravity
  • Chapter 13 Forward Kinematics: Making Things Walk
  • Chapter 14 Inverse Kinematics: Dragging and Reaching
• PART FOUR - 3D ANIMATION
  • Chapter 15 3D Basics
  • Chapter 16 3D Lines and Fills
  • Chapter 17 Backface Culling and 3D Lighting
• PART FIVE - ADDITIONAL TECHNIQUES
  • Chapter 18 Matrix Math
  • Chapter 19 Tips and Tricks

Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment

Ben Fry

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Enormous quantities of data go unused or underused today, simply because people can't visualize the quantities and relationships in it. Using a downloadable programming environment developed by the author, Visualizing Data demonstrates methods for representing data accurately on the Web and elsewhere, complete with user interaction, animation, and more. How do the 3.1 billion A, C, G and T letters of the human genome compare to those of a chimp or a mouse? What do the paths that millions of visitors take through a web site look like? With Visualizing Data, you learn how to answer complex questions like these with thoroughly interactive displays. We're not talking about cookie-cutter charts and graphs. This book teaches you how to design entire interfaces around large, complex data sets with the help of a powerful new design and prototyping tool called "Processing." Used by many researchers and companies to convey specific data in a clear and understandable manner, the Processing beta is available free. With this tool and Visualizing Data as a guide, you'll learn basic visualization principles, how to choose the right kind of display for your purposes, and how to provide interactive features that will bring users to your site over and over. This book teaches you: The seven stages of visualizing data -- acquire, parse, filter, mine, represent, refine, and interact How all data problems begin with a question and end with a narrative construct that provides a clear answer without extraneous details Several example projects with the code to make them work Positive and negative points of each representation discussed. The focus is on customization so that each one best suits what you want toconvey about your data set The book does not provide ready-made "visualizations" that can be plugged into any data set. Instead, with chapters divided by types of data rather than types of display, you'll learn how each visualization conveys the unique properties of the data it represents -- why the data was collected, what's interesting about it, and what stories it can tell. Visualizing Data teaches you how to answer questions, not simply display information.

Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D

Tony Mullen

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 8 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

You need this book. Definitely. 5 out of 5 stars.
6 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I ordered this book without much hesitation, once I discovered Tony was writing it. Having read his past book "Introducing Character Animation with Blender", I ordered this one without thinking twice. Now that this book is in my hands, I can't regret for my choice. The overall quality of the publication is impressive. Not only for the contents but also for the technical production: fine paper with color quality images. It's not common these days. The book is composed of 400 pages (7 chapters) plus an appendix and they are:

Chapter 1 - Re-creating the World: An overview
This chapter describes those tools and techniques that are not well explained elsewhere by the Blender literature. It covers topics like material creation with nodes, transparency, subsurface scattering, sky maps (sphere maps and angular maps) and those tools that can be used to fake physics, when accurate simulations are not necessary at all but you still need a "quick and dirty" method to achieve an effect efficiently and with sufficient speed (an example: water simulation with surface tension displacement or cloth simulation using a displacement modifier). Obviously, these techniques are useful for everyone involved using Blender. No doubt. Much appreciated.

Chapter 2 - The Nitty-Gritty on particles.
The first thing I thought after reading this chapter was:"WOW". *ALL* the latest development on Blender particles is covered here: emitters, reactors, positioning particles on a grid, chained physics systems, various types of visualizations, force fields (harmonic, magnetic, vortex, spherical, wind, etc.)
You will be guided through the creation of a convincing fire material using clouds and stencils textures! All is explained gradually and with great style. Highly informative.

Chapter 3 - Getting flexible with Soft Bodies and Cloth.
As you can expect, all that has been developed is covered here: baking, how to animate a spring, force fields and collision, using curves with softbodies (it will teach you how to animate a chain using an empty), stress maps, how to produce a fantastic cube of gelatin using lattices, simulating clothes. It will even explain how to use the demolition plugin to produce a window breaking in a spiderweb pattern!

Chapter 4 - Hair Essentials: The Long and Short of Strand Particles.
How to produce hair, fur and grass. After covering the basics, this chapter will guide you through the creation of an hairstyle on top of a practice head. One of my preferred chapters.

Chapter 5 - Making a Splash with Fluids.
One of the most interesting part of Blender: the fluid simulator. All is covered here: domains, resolution, inflow, outflow, fluid object intersection, kinematic viscosity, obstacles (considering animation, of course).

Chapter 6 - Bullet Physics and the Blender Game Engine.
One of the less undestood parts of Blender is certainly the game engine. So I was favourably impressed when I have seen an entire chapter dedicated to it. This chapter describes all the tools needed to produce hard bodies simulations, using the game engine and the powerfullness of the Bullet Physics Library. Actors, actuators, IPO curves, rigid body simulations with IPO curves, joints, ragdolls ... This is material that will be probably new to most Blender users.

Chapter 7 - Imitation of Life: Simulating Trees and Plants.
This chapter explores a few tools that can be used for creating trees and vegetation in general, like the L-System, ngPlant and Ivy Generator.

Each chapter is independent, so you don't need to read the book from the first page, with the exception of chapter 4, who strongly depends by the two previous chapters. This book is of course not intended for beginners. This book is completely updated with the latest Blender development and it covers the actual stable release. This is the documentation Blender needs. I highly recommend this book. It is well written, well presented, well structured and, most importantly, it's definitely fun!

Editorial Review:

Learn all about Blender, the premier open-source 3D software, in Bounce, Tumble, and Splash!: Simulating the Physical World with Blender 3D. You will find step-by-step instructions for using Blender’s complex features and full-color visual examples with detailed descriptions of the processes. If you’re an advanced Blender user, you will appreciate the sophisticated coverage of Blender’s fluid simulation system, a review Blender’s latest features, and a guide to the Bullet physics engine, which handles a variety of physics simulations such as rigid body dynamics and rag doll physics.

Adobe Flash CS3 Professional Classroom in a Book

Adobe Creative Team

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 44 Average rating: 2.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This project-based guide from Adobe will teach readers all they need to know to create engaging interactive content with Flash CS3. Using step-by-step instructions with projects that build on the knowledge learned in each lesson, readers will learn the key elements of the Flash interface, including panels, timelines, and frames. From there, readers will learn how to work with vector and bitmap graphics; create and edit symbols; modify text and add interactivity with ActionScript 3.0; and incorporate animation, music, and sound to their projects. They'll also learn how to prepare and export their finished projects for Web and broadcast. Of course, readers will also learn how to take advantage of the new features of Flash CS3--the streamlined user interface, native support for Photoshop and Illustrator files, revamped drawing tools, new video encoding features, code editing enhancements, and much more. The companion CD provides users with all the sample files they need to complete all of the projects.

Educational instructor notes—created to help teachers plan, organize, and time their lessons—are available for this book (and for other Classroom in a Book titles) at www.peachpit.com/instructorresources.