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Adobe’s Flash has always had a love-hate relationship with the Internet community. On one end, it allowed web publishers to display beautiful, interactive (and sometimes garish) animated content on their websites. On the other end, it crashed browsers, leaked memory and irritated a lot of people. However, its popularity has still been not shaken by other alternatives, like Microsoft’s Silverlight.

I have personally seen and admired a lot of Drupal websites with Flash powered content. Notable ones have been Mission Metallica (http://www.missionmetallica.com/) and Leadel (http://www.leadel.net/). However, The power and flexibility of the Drupal and Flash combo shouldn’t intimidate you anymore. Travis Tidwell’s “Flash with Drupal” from Packt Publishing is an amazing step by step guide for your journey.

I’m not a very experienced Flash or ActionScript programmer myself. However, just the initial chapters of the book were enough to give me a confidence boost. This isn’t as hard as it seems after all! The book succinctly covers the use of various contributed modules over its 350+ pages. It goes through the trickeries of asynchronous programming and REST. It takes you through the most asked questions around Drupal: Views, CCK, audio and video widgets etc. That said, this is not an introduction to Drupal. In fact, if you’re just starting out with Drupal, this book is not for you. The author assumes you’re comfortable with Drupal and its concepts. You should know your way in and out of Drupal. Not ready? Get hold of Packt’s “Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6”.

Flash seems to be feeling the heat with HTML5, but until that happens and cross-browser support stabilizes, Flash isn’t going anywhere. Now with this book, I expect to see a rise in the Flash and Drupal combination and more powerfully delivered content.

(Note: I was sent a free copy of the book by Packt for a review.)