Shannara said
If you take out all of the over-sized screenshots and code fluff, you are left with 15 pages of real information. Do not make the same mistake we did, find another book.
.. oh wait ... there are no decent, information filled books on Flex / Java integration out yet ...
devcon said
The reason I bought this book was because it has code examples, but my disappointment was that none of the examples I tried worked, (I did not try all of them). For example Child 7 (Chapter 7: this is another pet peeve of mine, although it has no bearing on the quality of the book - Why 'Child'? instead of Chapter it does not make any sense to me)
I keyed in the code from the book but it did not work, so I emailed the author for help, but did not get a response for few days. The author's suggestion did not work either, his suggestion was to add spring framework entry in the web.xml file, but Spring framework is not mentioned until Chapter 8 (excuse me, Child 8). I downloaded the code from the book's web side, the code did not work either. So this book is useless to me, because the reason I bought this book for does not work.
jh said
I was very disappointed in this book. I almost never take the time to write reviews if I generally agree with the consensus already established. Since none exist yet for 'Enterprise Flex with BlazeDS', I hope to save you some time and money.
First a couple of positives. I did glean a couple of ideas from it, but will have to research to implement them and understand them elsewhere (such as logging from Flex to log4j on the server).
The general context of the book is about an advanced subject, yet the author either seems to assume you are an idiot or just adds fluff to up the page count. The book is full of it. In the beginning, a 3/4 page screen shot of Firefox's download popup shows you how to download BlazeDS. Screen shots that could have easily been cropped or resized to fit on a page are pushed to the next page and leave 3/4 of the current page blank. An entire chapter is dedicated to just the sql to import into the db. Four chapters are dedicated in the middle of the book to basic Flex components that should be assumed to have been known beforehand. Chapters on Spring and Hibernate just confused me why they even existed, they were so light on details. Further, the font size is bigger than a lot of the children's books I read to by 4 year old. It wouldn't surprise me with a bit of simple editing, this book could be half the size.
I could live with a small book though, there are a lot of nice concise books out there on advanced subjects. However, this is the biggest fault of 'Enterprise Flex with BlazeDS': it lacks any real substance. It is a step by step instruction, or How To, nothing more. No real explanation is even attempted to why things are being done. Even when a step specifically says you HAVE to do something a certain way, no reason is given. Despite being new to Flex & BlazeDS, I finished the book without a better understanding about them than when I started.
I struggled with giving this book a 1 or 2 star rating since I did like the idea of logging from Flex to log4j. I finally went with a 1 star rating because I can't think of any audience, beginner or advanced, that would benefit from this book - and now you know about the logging idea if you didn't already. I can't think of any technical book I've ever read that seemed to put so little effort into it and one that I walked away from feeling a sucker for buying it.
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