In the final section, there are some suggestions on where to start if looking for help on selected multimedia topics. A general good starting point, besides fulltext searches on Google, is Wikipedia for getting detailed information and further links on multimedia formats and other topics.
Images are usually acquired from another web resource, a digital camera, or a scanner. Depending on your hardware setup, your operating system, and the image manipulation program the techniques you use for preparing images for the Web might differ. "Prepare images web gimp" or "prepare images web Photoshop" are valuable queries on Google for this purpose.
A good tool for manipulating audio available on all major platforms is Audacity. On the home page (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/), there are some general tips on processing digital audio. Processing audio files is called mastering, which might be a good keyword to include if searching for help.
A good starting point for getting help if working with videos is the home page of Flowplayer (http://flowplayer.org/tutorials/index.html). There are some tutorials on encoding videos for use with the Web. Another good source, which does not provide much information on its own but collects valuable resources from all over the Web, is www.videohelp.com. It contains links to video players, encoders, and other software and hardware tools. And it lists tutorials and How-Tos on encoding, capturing, and processing videos.
Both Flash and Silverlight are commercial solutions, and provide a good amount of documentation on their websites. Besides general documentation, there are tutorials and forums for both solutions. The Linux-specific part of Silverlight (Moonlight) can be found at http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/.
The API and some examples for creating Flash applets from scratch can be found on the pyswftools home page: http://pyswftools.sourceforge.net/.