I began reading Todd Yard's ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects as a text book, starting on page one and going through it chapter by chapter. After a few chapters this way I found that I wanted to skip around more to specific effects or classes that were of particular interest to me.

I have no reservations whatsoever in saying that I think that any ActionScript developer interested in applying image effects and manipulating bitmaps programmatically should have this text on hand. It is filled with thorough explanations of such processes.

My issue with the book is that I don't feel that it works well as a text book or as an instruction manual. Certainly if one were interested in applying a particular effect or gaining a better understanding of a specific method for manipulating a bitmap, instructions for these things can be found in this book. However, I feel that Mr. Yard's explanations of some of these things could be written out in a way that was easier to grasp at a first reading.

Throughout the book code samples are presented that relate to the classes & functions being discussed in that chapter. On several occasions, although I had been able to follow along up to that point, the block of code presented would slow the pace of my reading considerably. Rather than having the code commented along the way, leading the reader through the code as they read it, an explanation of what is being done by each part is generally presented in the text after the code block, meaning the reader has to read the code, and then go back and forth between the explanation and the code again to fully grasp what is going on. Sometimes no explanation of what the reader would see if they were to view the resulting swf is readily offered, which seems to assume that the reader is looking at and outputting the code samples in the Flash API at the same time, which many of us are certainly not doing.

While this may seem a major criticism of the book, I think that I would like to re-emphasize my initial take on the book, which is that it is an essential reference book, very thorough in its explanations, even if fully grasping at a first read them may have taken a bit more than I would have liked.