It is often much more fun to 'invent' things by yourself, and the reward when, after lots of trail and error, things work is much greater. But these well documented chapters and the files on the CD-Rom will certainly be very usefull to kickstart the gamemaking process. There weren't any books on Shockwave and Director games specificly and his book will fill this gap perfectly. I'm really looking forward to it's publication. If you want to build games for the web, start here.
Nothing is better for learning a programming language than samples of working code.
Gary Rosenzweig has assembled an excellent collection of well-annotated examples from real web games that cover the basics of game programming technique, as well as a wide range of game design issues. The examples are big enough to be complete, but small enough to be digestible. Anyone learning to build web games should read this book, even if their language is not Lingo. And anyone learning Lingo will find this book useful, even if they aren't trying to build games. Gary has a great way of explaining things which makes this advanced Lingo lesson easy for any user.