As I announced a few days ago I got a chance to get my hands on the new Packt Publishing book "Flash with Drupal". Now that I'm finished with the book I would like to share my thoughts about it.
First of all: Travis Tidwall, the author of "Flash with Drupal" did a very good job and the quality is as you would expect it from a Packt Publishing book. I've read already the "Drupal Development" book and was very pleased with the logical structure of the reading. But let's go to "Flash with Drupal".
On 363 pages and with many screenshots we're about to learn the combination of one of the buzziest content management systems Drupal and the state of the art animation technique Adobe Flash. Whoever worked with Flash knows that it lacks a good way to organise and write content in your beautiful designed and animated interface and this is where Drupal comes to play.
Travis starts with the basics in the first chapter which are the installation of Drupal and Flash and the first creation of content in Drupal and a movie clip in Flash. After the single contents are created the first connection between Drupal and Flash is made by installing the flashnode module and adding our previously created movie by using the module.
After the first steps in both world is made we want to let the both worlds talk to each other with a well known friendly "Hello World".
Prior to build the application we learn about the bottlenecks in the communication between the Drupal server and the Flash client. Asynchronous communication is the keyword for this problem and leads us to nothing less than the introduction to the use of callback functions in our application.
With the knowledge of the communications and the modules needed for it the next chapters introduces us step by step with more necessary Drupal content types and their integration in Flash. Image, audio and video files creation in Drupal is explained chapter by chapter and we learn how to insert them dynamically into our Flash application. Every chapter is built on the previous chapter and progress is made step by step with the help of code examples.
But the book doesn't end with managing content in Drupal and bringing it to style in Flash, no, it teaches us how to master bidirectional exchange between our worlds. Create the content within our flash application and save it back to Drupal, awesome, isn't it?
