Should I Learn Flash or No?

I am getting into the web design field, and right now I am taking classes learning the basic skills involved in this type of work.

I was thinking of taking a class to learn Flash, but not sure if I should since it's dying. I am starting to learn HTML5 and was wondering if I should even bother learning flash at all? I know there are a lot of sites that do use Flash, but for how long?

I have NO experience with Flash, it's like a foreigh language to me to be honest, should I take the class to learn the basics or save my money?

 

Personally I woud say forget flash for the following reasons.

Flash is and alwasys has been slow to load even with a 25MB cable connection it is still slow.

Flash eats up bandwidth of both the web site and the person viewing it. There are restrictions on bandwith usage even thought many ISP's claim unlimited they are NOT they limit you with the fair use policy.

Flash is actually blocked by many people running FireFox with No Script for example. and has to be specifically allowed by the viewer.

I am sure others will disagree but that is my opinion.

 

It really depends. Some people learn better if they're in a classroom with a teacher, some learn better using tutorials and their imagination. It's all on you.

 

If I were you, I would not learn flash. Learn something useful else instead, like PHP or CSS.

 

Flash could be really annoying when surfing but if you are planning on designing then it's a must!

Good Luck!

 

Flash still has it's uses so I'd say learn it if you have the time and/or funding.
If not, you can use jQuery to handle a lot of similar effects.

 

You can learn flash but it isn't a must in my opinion. Just learn it on your free time, it still has its uses, you can do many powerful things with it, but as it stands now, a lot are getting developed that will soon surpass flash.

 

I also personally believe that flash will be dead in a few years due to HTML5 and such...

 

You can never know too much. Even if you don't ever use Flash, understanding it will help you to understand when its appropriate to implement it.

 

Did you hijack my idea?

Actually I was believe in this about 3 years ago !

 

html 5 wont take over flash for a while as it wont be standard practice for a few years at least for the current browsers to catch up on the new stuff. Yeah most browsers can take advantage of the new html elements / tags but it wont become standard practice ( ie a must have) for many years to come.

But i would say dont learn flash straight away but if you really must then by all means learn this once you learn other more practical coding languages such as php etc.

 

Haha, lol. No I didn't. I've never actually thought of this before... I just started thinking about it when I saw the words flash and HTML5 in the same sentence.

 

HTML5 can handle the basic of video streaming, but it cannot handle a lot of advanced things that Flash can. You can check my blog for more information - http://youtubeking10.blogspot.com/2010/07/adobe-flash-is-still-best-platform-for.html
However, Flash is not search engine friendly. Google cannot index Flash page completely.

 

No...flash is slowly disappearing and HTML5 and other languages will probably become standard

 

The truth is that flash is slow and buggy, and has poor IDE support (Unless they fixed that in cs5).

AThe time and effort could be better spent learning HTML 5.

If when your finished, you still want/need to learn flash than the html5 will give you a fairly good grounding in what your doing.

 

Well, if you need to display animated content, flash is very good. But, if you don't need bells and whistles on your site, then don't go for flash.

 

Learn HTML 5!

 

Sounds like I will skip this class and just self-teach myself the basics, thank you.

 

if you have time and money isn't a problem, then learn it. it can be handy some time. But learn any server language (php or asp) first.