Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50415 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780596517328
• BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

About the Author
Alaric Cole has been working with Flash technologies since the introduction of ActionScript. Once it came on the scene, he's been focused primarily on Flex development, creating enterprise applications with rich data visualization, interactive media, and advanced user interface components. Pushing Flex beyond its comfort zone, he has worked with Adobe to discover ways to improve the technology.

A leader in the industry, Alaric has spoken at conferences such as Adobe MAX and 360|Flex, and has contributed a number of open-source components to the Flex community. He uses Flex in his daily work at Yahoo!, leading development and consulting on projects across the company.

Customer Reviews

Good choice to get your feet wet with Flex
The first thing that stood out is that it's in color! I love color, especially for technical material it adds a whole extra dimension to the medium and another vehicle by which to communicate. Obviously in code listings it makes the code easier to visually digest and mentally break down what you're seeing, and with screen caps color is so much more appealing.

The dimension of the book is wider that normal, which gives the book an extra wide gutter that the publisher is able to leverage. And leverage they do by making use of it for an assortment of side bars, notes, tips, and blurbs.

So aside from the aesthetics, content of course is the key. The book is aimed at beginners who don't necessarily have any sort of programming background - so the audience that this book would appeal to includes anyone interested in learning more about Flex and if it's the right fit for them; as a quick read (only 304 pages) you can blast through this book in a short amount of time.

Who might those people be? Developers wanting to test the waters with Flex because they had heard good things about it, Flash or Web media designers thinking about getting into the development side of things with Flex, and management level folks looking to explore new opportunities and want to get a barometer reading on what it would take to get into Flex, etc...

The writing style is fairly casual, and you feel like the author is talking to you (as opposed to the feeling of a manual). I think the author does a pretty good job at keeping things high level with enough meat to make the reader feel they're actually being productive as they work through the examples.

So I'd recommend this book to someone who wants to get their feet wet with Flex - someone who may not be fully committed to Flex at this point in time and doesn't want to invest a ton of time yet.

* Difficulty Level: Beginner
* Range of topics: Moderate
* Depth of topics: Light
* Development experience needed: None
* Reading Speed: Fast
* Writing Style: Casual

A great beginning to intermediate Flex 3 book
I've worked with Flash and ActionScript for a few years, but I'm new to Flex so I purchased three Flex books and I found this one to be the best one. I like how the author has you build smaller applications that work by themselves but also adds more features to them as the book progresses.

There are some minor code issues, but he answered my questions on his website which is one of the best book websites I've seen [...]. All of the source files and the working applications can be viewed on his site.

I also really enjoy the layout of the new Learning series that O'Reilly has been putting out (similar to the Learning ActionScript 3 book). The color coding and pictures are a nice change from the majority of black and white technical books.

Since the focus of this book is Flex and MXML, newer programmers will need to supplement this book with an ActionScript book once they start to build more advanced applications.

Highly recommended for those who are new to Flex.

This is it!
I have started to read several Flex books in the past. I say "started", because I quickly lost interest. Many times I found myself scratching my head saying "Why would anyone ever do that?"

This book has been an amazing adventure. The examples are relevant, the writing is entertaining without being off topic, and best of all, within the first 5 chapters I knew enough to make a basic Flex website.

If you have some web design experience with html, and css, then I highly recommend this book!