Emanuele Feronato - Box2D for Flash Games

Emanuele Feronato has been studying programming languages since the early 1980s, with a particular interest in game development. He taught online programming for the European Social Fund (ESF) and founded a web development company in Italy.

As a Game Developer, he has developed Flash games sponsored by the biggest game portals and his games have been played more than 70 million times, and he is now porting most of them on mobile platforms.

As a writer, he has worked as a Technical Reviewer for Packt Publishing and published the book Flash Game Development by Example , Packt Publishing .

His blog, www.emanueleferonato.com, is one of the most visited blogs about indie programming.

First of all I would like to give a big thank you to Erin Catto, the guy who developed Box2D, and to Boris the Brave for porting it to AS3.

A thank you also goes to Shraddha Bagadia and the entire Packt Publishing team for believing in this project, as well as to the reviewers for dealing with my drafts and improving the book.

The biggest thank you obviously goes to my blog readers and to my Facebook fans for appreciating my work, giving me the will to write more and more.

I also want to thank my wife Kirenia for being patient while I was writing rather than helping her to paint the house. Awesome job Kirenia!

Joseph Hocking is an interactive media developer living in Chicago. He has spent many years developing Flash games for various companies and freelance clients, and currently works for Synapse Games developing games such as Tyrant and Skyshard Heroes. His development skills include programming web-based games in AS3/Flash, using JavaScript in web pages, writing Python for both client and server applications, and building iPhone games using Lua/Corona SDK.

In addition, Joe also teaches at schools such as the Game Development program at Columbia College. Besides graphics programming, he has a great deal of training and experience in digital arts, including 3D animation. A portfolio of his work can be viewed at www.newarteest.com.

Ali Raza has a master's degree in Computer Science, and more than 8 years of experience as a Designer and Developer. He is also an Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI) and a Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT).

He is currently working with a UK-based social networking startup as a Senior Developer (Flash Platform), and as a Consultant with a US-based firm ProContent, LLC (team behind Advanced Flash Components). In the past, he has worked with different national and international advertising, telecommunication, and IT firms.

In his free time, Ali enjoys designing and developing cross-platform desktop and mobile applications using Adobe technologies.

Ali has technically reviewed books on Adobe Flash, gaming, and HTML5. He has also published exam aids on Adobe Flex 3 and 4. He was also appointed as a Contributing Editor for Flash & Flex Developer's Magazine in 2011. He can be reached at <>.

I would like to express my gratitude to Packt Publishing and the author for bringing about such a wonderful title.

I would also like to thank Priyanka Shah and Shraddha Bagadia for giving me the opportunity to review this amazing book on Box2D.

If you look at the most successful Flash games, most of them use physics to add realism and features, which would not have been possible otherwise. This book will guide you through the creation of physics games using Box2D, a free open source physics engine, which is the most used one among game developers. Throughout the book, you will learn how to use Box2D while you create real games.