My best friend is looking to expand his skill set as a designer and get into the Flash business. Along the way I’ve given him some advise that I thought I would share. Here goes:

First things first are the books to read. I would start with the Flash 8 Bible by Robert Reinhardt and Snow Dowd. If you’re a designer then it’s likely that you’ve read the Photoshop Bible so you know what you’re in for. These books cover just about everything without getting you in over your head. These are sort of the “wading up to your waist” approach to learning a new app. What’s great is that you can come back to these books later as a reference.

I wouldn’t suggest trying to read the entire book right off the bat. I don’t have the book in front of me so I can’t say specifically what chapters to focus on. In general you want to thoroughly read the first half to two-thirds of the book that introduces you to the essentials of timelines, MovieClips, text fields, Actionscript and so on. You probably don’t need to bother with things like how Flash handles audio/video unless you need that for a specific project you’re going to work on.

However, I would certainly suggest that you at least scan everything in the book even if it doesn’t make sense to you. Later, when you’re working on a project and trying to figure out how to tackle an unknown you’ll be much better prepared if you have a basic understanding of all of the capabilities the Flash player has.

When you’re ready to move on to the next book you have a choice to make. With most of the Flash 8 Bible under your belt you’re ready to read the following books in either order.

A. Actionscript for Flash MX - The Definitive Guide, 2nd Edition

B. Flash 8 Actionscript Bible

I would lean towards the Actionscript for Flash MX book first because it’s very concise. (note: Flash MX is really Flash 7.) The second half of the book is a reference guide which isn’t meant to be read beginning to end. The first half of the book is the best review of Actionscript around.

You might be wondering why I didn’t suggest the “Actionscript for Flash 8″ book. That’s because sadly there isn’t one. However, it really doesn’t matter that much because both MX and 8 use Actionscript 2.0. That’s the important thing. All that has changed between MX and 8 is that the Flash player has added a few more capabilities but the essentials are still exactly the same.

The Flash 8 Actionscript Bible will cover all the new capabilities of the new Flash player that you missed in the AS Flash MX book. By now you might be feeling that you’re reading the same thing over and over again. That’s good. Redundancy is a great way to learn.

These three books are really all you need if all you’ll be doing is timeline based Flash projects. But if you want to experience the full power of Flash then you’ll want to step into the world of Object Oriented Programming (OOP). These last two books gave you an introduction to OOP but there is no question that Essential Actionscript 2.0 is the book to read to get the full measure out of Flash Actionscript.

Once you have a grasp of about 75% of the material in these books then I’d say that you are technically ready to do just about anything. Because by this time if you don’t know how to do something you know where to go to get that knowledge.

How well you deal with organizing your time and your timeline while working on Flash is a totally different subject. First aim for technical understanding. Organization will come with practice, a.k.a. trial and error. I’ll write more on that later.