Here are four Free Online Flash Books to help you master this web development application. Adobe Flash is rapidly becoming the Web's most widely used platform for creating rich media with animation and motion graphics, but mastering Flash isn't easy. These books will help you increase your Flash skills in many areas and features of Flash, including color effects, drawing and masking, animation, 3D, text, audio, video, user interface, printing, XML, and Actionscript. ActionScript is Flash's programming language that allows you to produce compelling multimedia web sites and more.


Flash Book
 - Visual Effects
 - Color Effects
 - Drawing and Masking
 - Animation
 - 3D and Physics
 - Text
 - Sound
 - User Interface Elements
 - Performance and Optimization
 - ActionScript
 - Browser Integration

Flash and XML: A Developer's Guide
 - Flash Basics
 - Flash ActionScript
 - More ActionScript
 - XML
 - HTTP
 - Recursive
 - Database
 - SQL
 - Serving
 - Two-Way
 - Cookies
 - Flash to
 - Multiplexed
 - End Note

Flash 8: Projects for Learning Animation and Interactivity
 - Getting Started, Right Out of the Box
 - Creating Quickly: Customizing Your Workspace
 - Your First Animation
 - Buttons and Interactivity
 - Working with Graphics
 - Movie Clips and Interactivity
 - More Animation Techniques
 - Using Sound
 - Using Video
 - Compositing and Bitmap Effects
 - Working with Text
 - Loading Assets on the Fly
 - e-Learning with Flash
 - Flash for CD-ROM and Handhelds
 - Think Outside the Box

Flash ActionScript: Training from the Source
 - Lesson1: Introduction to ActionScript 2.0
 - Lesson2: Functions
 - Lesson3: Conditional Logic
 - Lesson4: Arrays and Loops
 - Lesson5: Built-in Classes
 - Lesson6: Custom Classes
 - Lesson7: Events, Listeners, and Callbacks
 - Lesson8: Dynamically Creating Assets
 - Lesson9: Bitmap Features
 - Lesson10: UI Components
 - Lesson11: Advanced Object-Oriented Design
 - Lesson12: Data Validation
 - Lesson13: External Data Connections
 - Lesson14: XML and Flash
 - Lesson15: External Interface
 - Lesson16: Sound and Video
 - Lesson17: Printing and Context Menus
 - Lesson18: Maximum-Strength SWF Files

Here is an excellent Illustrator Tutorial, Adobe Illustrator CS2 Essentials, from the Institute of Advanced Studies. This tutorial will teach you about both designing and illustrating multimedia artwork using Illustrator CS2, which is a graphics editing application used for printing, multimedia, and online graphics. This Illustrator tutorial gives you the steps and tasks needed for using Illustrator's many tools to produce quality and professional looking graphics. Its 15 sections are listed below, 25 pages in length and 9.45mb in size (pdf format).


Contents of Illustrator Essentials Tutorial:

 - Getting Started
 - The Illustrator Workspace
 - The Toolbox
 - Tool Descriptions
 - Placing Files
 - Making Selections
 - Creating Basic Shapes
 - Inserting and Formating Text
 - Arranging
 - Grouping
 - Locking
 - Applying Styles and Effects
 - Working with Symbols
 - Saving and Exporting
 - Getting Help

Here is a 6-page Illustrated Dreamweaver Tutorial that will help you starting creating web pages with this application. I takes you through six fundamental web page topics showing how to get started, setting page properties, working with text, creating hyperlinks, adding images, and adding and managing tables. These 8-steps are in Adobe Photoshop tutorial, which is of six pages in pdf format and is 443kb in size.


Contents of this Dreamweaver Tutorial:

Getting Started
   File Storage/Architecture
   Page Creation
   Properties Palette
   Naming Conventions

Setting Page Properties

Enhancing Text
   Heading Sizes
   Font Size and Color
   Alignments
   Bulleted and Numbered Lists
   Text Indext / Tab
   Single / Double Space

Creating a Link
   Absolute Link
   Relative Link
   Email Link
   Document / PDF file Link
   Image Links
   
Adding Images
   Src tag
   Align tag
   link tag
   Alt tag
   Width and Height tags
   
Adding and Managing Tables
   Width
   Border
   Cell Padding
   Cell Spacing
   Merging Cells
   Splitting Cells

Here are two Photoshop Tutorials from the Institute of Advanced Study. One will help you with working with Digital Images usages and other one will show you hows to scan an image into Photoshop. Also included in this post is another Photoshope scanning how to document from Emory University.


Working with Digital Images using Adobe Photoshop CS2

This Photoshop CS2 tutorial teaches you the basic features and tools of Photoshop. No prior experience with Photoshop is necessary. The tutorial is in 24 pages and 567kb in size (pdf format).

Contents of this Photoshop CS2 Tutorial:

• Introduction
• Topics:

• Basic interface and the toolbars in the program.
• Making and saving a new document
• How to use layers and history
• How to use the basic tools such as zoom, pan, brush, select, crop etc.
• How to create text
• How to fix a red eye

• General Terminology
• Creating A New Document
• Getting To Know The Work
• The Toolbox
• Viewing The Image
• Cropping a Photo
• Adjusting Levels And Brightness
• Resizing an Image
• Rotating an Image
• Fixing Red
• Using The Color Picker
• Typing Text
• Layers and The Layer
• History Palette
• Photoshop Help

Scanning an Image into Photoshop

This document reviews how to scan an image into Photoshop. It takes you through seven steps to accomplish this task. After the image is scanned, Photoshop will open the scanned image in a new window. This scanning tutorial is of 2 pages in length and 124 KB in size (pdf format).


Scanning Documents with Adobe Photoshop

This is an 8-step Photoshop scanning tutorial provided by Emory University. For images used in PowerPoint, web pages, and e-mail, you want to set a resolution of 72 ppi (pixels per inch). Images scanned for printing require higher resolutions and are generally very large files (not good for e-mail, etc.). 150 ppi would be good for a high quality black and white print. 300 ppi would be a high quality color print. Note that when you change the resolution of an image, it will often appear smaller on the screen. Click on the View pull-down menu and select 'Actual Pixels' to see the true size of your image. (2 pages, 946kb, pdf format).

Here is a great Dreamweaver CS3 Tutorial to get up to speed fast using Dreamweaver CS3, called Getting Started with Dreamweaver CS3. It takes you through several interactive screen simulations that will help you learn the fundamental features for creating and updating a new website. The specific features demonstrated are listed below. This tutorial introduces you to understanding a Dreamweaver website for a simulated product named Aquo Drink. Using Adobe Dreamweaver CS3, you can not only create HTML documents, but also enter and manage code for XHTML, CFML, ASP, ASPX, JSP, PHP, XML, XSL, JavaScript, and CSS. Dreamweaver also supports source code files for many programming languages.

Dreamweaver Tasks taught by this tutorial:
 - Setting up a site
 - Creating a new document
 - Setting page properties
 - Inserting tables
 - Working with tables
 - Inserting an image placeholder
 - Inserting text
 - Inserting images
 - Inserting and playing Flash files
 - Creating links
 - Previewing the page in your browser
 - Inserting Flash video files
 - Publishing your site