Average book
Like most of the time, if not always in this serie, this book has one big project that we build from chapter to chapter, which makes it less relevant as a reference book.
The project covers a lot of topics, but can be somewhat hard for real beginners. For example, I used this book to teach a class and wasn't able to go through everything because they always had questions and had trouble to follow.
For beginners, I would more likely recommand "Macromedia Flash 8 Visual Quickstart guide". For more advanced users who would like to know more advanced topics as well as ActionScript, the follower, "Macromedia Flash 8 Advanced: Visual Quickpro" is a good choice.