How to Use This Book

The applications in this book are cross-platform. In fact, many of the figures show either a Macintosh or a PC interface. Apart from the Operating System differences, you should have no difficulty working through this book using your computer. To ensure both sides of the computing divide are accommodated, we will show keyboard commands in the following manner:

To open a new Fireworks MX 2004 document, select Command-N (Mac) or Control-N (PC).

Menu commands are treated a bit differently. They are presented as Menu, Submenu, Submenu. For example:

To open a new Fireworks MX 2004 document, select File, New.

Keyboard commands do differ between the platforms. They will be shown as Keystroke-Keystroke, followed by the platform to which it is applicable in parentheses. The previous example told you to press the Control and N keys if you use a PC or the Command and N keys if you use a Macintosh.

In certain cases, you will be asked to use the mouse to complete a particular task. This is also an area where platform differences are evident. Contextual menus are the poster children for this. On a PC, the instruction is:

To open the Contextual menu, right-click the object.

The Macintosh is a bit different. Though the Macintosh world is increasing populated with third-party mice containing a second mouse button, Apple has always provided a one-button mouse. In this case, the Mac instruction would be:

To open the Contextual menu, Control-click the object.

The cross platform instruction would be:

To open the Contextual menu, right-click (PC) or Control-click (Mac) the object.

Code is unavoidable when building Dynamic Sites. Throughout the book, you will be asked to enter, change, or optimize code. There will be three major code languages used throughout the book. The first is the one that drives the webHTML. The second is the language that drives FlashActionscript. And the third is the language that drives DirectorLingo.

In all cases, code will be easy to identify due to the use of a special typeface. For example, a code listing will look like this:

 <HTML> <Head> <title> Hello World!</title> </head> </HTML> 

When code needs to be changed, we indicate the change in this manner:

 On exitFrame  Go to the frame  End 

By showing the code in bold text, you can quickly identify what needs to change and where the code is located. Using bold italic type as shown then indicates the change:

 On exitFrame  Go to frame 3  End 

In this case, the instruction you would follow is presented in the following manner:

There are occasions where you won't want to stay put. In this case, the frame script in Director MX would change from a frame loop to a "jump" to a particular frame.

  1. This is easily accomplished by opening the frame script and selecting the command:

     On exitFrame  Go to the frame  End 
  2. With the command selected, change the command to jump to Frame 3 of the movie:

     On exitFrame  Go to frame 3  End 

The last thing you need is a 500-page typing lesson. To avoid these, we will, on occasion, explain why the change is being made or the purpose of the code being entered.

An example would be explaining the purpose of a line of Actionscript in Flash:

 If_(framesloaded,=_totalFrames){ 

If the number of frames loaded into memory equals the number of frames in the entire Flash movie then

 GoToAndPlay("Go"); 

go to the frame label "Go" and start playing the movie from that point.

 } 

This book also follows a few typographical conventions:

  • A new term is set in italics the first time it is introduced.

  • As suggested previously, commands, functions, variables and other components of the coding languages are set in a fixed-width font. This is true for the text as well as listings. For example, <title> Hello World from Three Lost Souls!</title>.

  • Code lines that do not fit on the page of the book will continue on the next line and will be preceded by a continuation character graphics/ccc.gif .



Building Dynamic Websites with Macromedia Studio MX 2004
Building Dynamic Web Sites with Macromedia Studio MX 2004
ISBN: 0735713766
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 158

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net