flash (macromedia): I am helping a friend turn his book into an interactive CD-ROM. I was going to
do the whole thing as one whole inidividual .fla file. But someone suggested
doing a main .fla file for the overall structure and then using individual .swf
files for the chapters. Is this easy to do? How would I lay out the main
timeline and what would I use for the directory to go back and forth between
the files (i.e. _parent.chapter1.text.swf)? Any enlightenment would be
appreciated. Thanks!

Yes, that would be best. You would use loadMovie to load each chapter. For
example, if you had an empty movie on stage with the instance name of
chapterHolder, you could load each chapter into it wih buttons as follows:
on(press) { _root.chapterHolder.loadMovie('chapter1.swf'); } In that way, you
could have a different button for each chapter. The extenal swf will load at
the coordinates of the empty MC.