Packt Publishing recently released a new book - Flash with Drupal by Travis Tidwell, focused on building Flash CS3 and CS4 applications for Drupal 6.

First chapter starts with a necessary introduction to Drupal, it's installation on WAMP and creating databases using phpMyAdmin. An introduction to Flash CS4 follows, which I consider especially important for people who don't know anything about Flash.

What is the first thing you do when learning a new technology or language? A Hello World application! And that's what Chapter 2 focuses on, using Services module. This chapter includes a description of possible race conditions in Flash applications related to user interactions.

Chapter 3 describes CCK content types in Drupal and shows and example of building a recipe Flash application, getting data from Drupal. Here is the catch - I am not experienced with Flash but wouldn't it be possible to execute something like Cross Site Scripting inside Flash? Since we are getting live user data from Drupal, I would expect a little bit more background about security and proper escaping of the received texts.

Chapters 4-7 are focusing on integrating with various multimedia - Images, Audio and Video and chapter 8 adds information about communicating with Flash from Javascript. The result is a multipurpose media player.

The second part of the book gives an insight to more advanced capabilities of Flash and Drupal - user management, node management and finally - building your own service and making a Fivestar widget in Flash. This is as I know one of the first descriptions of building a Services call in a book - definitely a plus point for the book.

Overall summary - this book gives an interesting and quick insight into building Flash applications integrated with Drupal. I would recommend it to anybody who is interesting in these topics. You don't have to know a lot about both technologies, however some understanding of PHP/ActionScript is desirable. You can buy it here.

Disclaimer: Packt Publishing provided this book for review.