WOW! I'm Very Impressed! - Stencyl Essentials

Just finished reading Stencyl Essentials by Richard Sneyd (pick it up at Packt or Amazon). I was a bit wary about yet another game creation tool that touted no coding necessary in order to create high quality games for iOS, Android, desktop, etc. So, I read this book and I'm happy to say that I'm very glad I did. Richard Sneyd has done an impressive job at creating a very fast, yet simple to grasp introduction and implementation of a full 2D side-scroller game. In particularl, he gives detail where detail is appropriate in order to help the user understand the "why", and then lays out the "how" in very easy to understand terms. The detail does not come in a lot of vast technical explanations about the underlying system, but rather very well placed analogies that, in my opinion, really helped me understand the tools; after-all, I think that's the whole point of the book (It gives you a well founded explanation of the essential ingredients in order to create a high quality and fun to play game). I had no idea Stencyl was such a powerful tool.
I highly recommend this book to anyone - beginner to expert. Though an expert game developer probably would not opt to use Stencyl since they would surely have their own framework setup already, this book really does a great job of convincing me to use Stencyl for some of my 2D games, and I will be using it. Thanks Richard!