Attention Captivation
John Ulliman has managed to do something utterly amazing: kick off 24 hours worth of training with a bang that makes you excited to be taking the course. Rather than opening with a bunch of tedious information about the program, John announces that he’s going to do a little demonstration of a few of Flash’s abilities and welcomes us to follow along. What’s clever about this is he re-explains that he’ll do all the work and we don’t have to follow along if we don’t want to, because he’ll come back to everything he covers in this demo in later lessons. As such, you feel no pressure to follow along, yet his demo project is so interesting and he moves at such an easy to follow pace that you find that you’re very anxious to follow along.
The opening piece is actually a fairly complex flash cartoon with an interactive interface. John makes it easy to understand what he’s doing and, when you’re done with the project, you’re really excited about what you’ve just accomplished. This is a far cry from most intro-projects that look like a five year old designed them!
While things aren’t quite as fast paced from then on, the excitement level is still much higher in this series than many training series that I’ve used.
Reusability
With the amount of training packed into this series, you’ll definitely find that you’re reusing it a lot. While veterans might find they only gloss over things from time to time, the beginning to intermediate audience for whom it was designed will find they go back to places they’ve bookmarked repeatedly. And, if you get to the point where you can have someone else doing your flash designs, then having this set will be a great way to make sure they’re up to speed.
The only thing that really gets in the way of the reusability is the sizing issues and the inability to keep the training screen on top, which we mentioned earlier in the review.
Value vs. Cost
Twenty-four hours of in-depth training that’s both well done and interesting for only $299 makes this a smart buy for virtually anyone that wants to make a well-designed Flash site. (You don’t even want to know what it would cost to go to training seminars for this type of training!) While advanced users might want to go to the Master Series level courses, the amount that’s covered in this series still makes it a very good investment.
Overall Comment
This is a great Flash training series from the folks at Total Training. Possibly one of the most easy to follow and easy to engage trainers that I’ve run across, the ever-gregarious John Ulliman keeps the majority of the 24 hours of training in this set rolling along nicely. Definitely recommended for anyone who wants to really kick their site up and showcase more elements of their films using Flash!
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Comprehension |
9.5 |
Depth
of Information |
9.5 |
Interest
Level |
10.0 |
Reusability |
9.0 |
Value
vs. Cost |
9.5 |
Overall
Score |
9.5
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