Larry Gerndt said
This is by far the best introductory Flex book on the market, for the following reasons:
1) It's in color. The judicious use of color and fonts in this book made reading the material much easier. The book is literally a work of art. This in itself sets a high bar for anyone planning to write a new tech book. But it's not just the color...
2) It's comprehensive. This book is more than just a great introduction. It covers a lot of ground--all I needed to get up to speed on a complex Flex app I took over at work.
3) It's well written. Alaric might be a programmer, but he must have double-majored in technical writing. Very few authors can write a technical book that is a pleasure to read from cover to cover. The material builds and flows, proceeding gracefully from one topic to the next, showing just the right amount of code, never more than necessary. For this the author has my gratitude.
Summary: Color would be but a novelty if the writing was bad, just as using gratuitous Flex effects would annoy a user. But Alaric isn't out to impress you with his fancy colors. He's out to teach you, and it so happens that the color is part of the means to that end. Get this book, you will not regret it.
Gunnar Hillert said
Learning Flex 3 by Alaric Cole is a great introductory book for Adobe Flex 3. If you have some basic experience with HTML, JavaScript and CSS, then you will learn the basics of Flex rapidly using this book as a guide. Some of the areas that are taught are:
* How to use Flexbuilder
* Using MXML
* ActionScript 3
* Styling your application using CSS
However, if your professional background is in web-application development using Java or other OO languages, then you are probably more likely to skip or cross-read sections of the book. This is because the book starts out with practically no initial pre-requirements, and thus you might be familiar with some of the discussed areas.
The book gave me an excellent overview of Flex's capabilities, and they are all explained thoroughly and are easily understandable. Also, this may sound silly, but I particularly liked the refreshing fact that the book is in color, unlike most other IT books.
Furthermore, the book explained Data Binding (Chapter 7) very well. This is something I was not familiar with coming from the Java world. The chapter illustrates the concepts of one-way binding, two-way binding and making your own variables "bindable" using a metadata declaration, which is basically an annotation in Java parlance.
Another feature I liked a lot was View States (Chapter 12), which allows you to rearrange, group and reuse components within your application.
I wish the book provided more information for further reading. I understand that certain concepts are beyond the scope of this book, but it would have been nice if those had been mentioned and links or recommendations for further reading were provided.
For example, while AMF is mentioned on page 8 and on page 157 the book briefly talks about the Webservice and RemoteObject component, the book should have also mentioned BlazeDS as one of Flex's core technologies for communicating with back-end servers.
And for more complex applications, the book could have at least pointed out some of the available MVC frameworks for Flex and some pointers of where to read more about them (E.g. Cairngorm and PureMVC). Well, and then there is Degrafa, the declarative graphics framework...
While the author explains the aspects of using CSS in Flex applications very well, he could have further stressed that Flex uses a subset of CSS, which in certain areas behaves differently compared to CSS you more typically use in HTML pages. He should have enumerated some of those pitfalls.
Having said all this, these issues mentioned above are minor in nature. Overall, the book was a fun read! And particularly to Java web-developers, Flex may very well be THE contender for application user interfaces moving forward. One of the great things about Flex is that even the standard components look very good (and should be good enough to please your boss), and your application looks and behaves consistently across various browsers. Oh, and yes you can run the same application on the desktop as well (Chapter 15).
This book will definitely help you learn and master Flex, and you should be able to produce functional user interfaces quickly. In order to learn more about integrating Flex with your Spring powered back-end you may want to also consider looking at "Pro Flex on Spring" by Chris Giametta.
J. Rapisardi said
I had high hopes for this book. I'm just getting into Flex/Actionscript/MXML, but I have some experience with other languages like PHP, JS and of course lots of experience with HTML/CSS. I found the first few chapters of this book to be pretty good, but around chapter 6 it just takes a nose dive into badly constructed and illogical examples and vague wording. The author will often interject a short code example with NO real explanation at all, and seems to just expect the reader to accept it without any real understanding. He seems to miss the point that an extremely strong understanding of every aspect of the basics is vital in becoming a versed programmer in any language. A beginner to programming would be completely lost because of the lack of depth and explanation. I feel that the only reason I could comprehend it was because of my previous experience with other scripting languages. On the other hand, those with intermediate or advanced experience with Actionscript would see this book as useless. So in my opinion, this book completely misses the mark. There is no one it's really great for.
Johnny Ren said
The book is organized well. The tutorial is easy to follow. The code from companion web works well.
A. Stock said
Save yourself some coin and go here instead [...] and then buy these two books: Flex 3 in Action and Flex 3 Cookbook then you should be set. Both are excellent books and will get you a long way down the Adobe Flex road. Learning Flex 3 is not a good book at all. Two rules of thumb when buying a computer training book. Rule #1 - Does it show the complete example of the code to the procedure you are learning when you get done with the exercise. This does two things. A. Shows you correct way to code. B. Shows you the author knows how to code. Rule #2 - Are the code examples and resources available from the internet or a companion CD or both? This is a must! You should be able to compare your code with actual working code. Learning Flex 3 has none of these which demonstrates that perhaps the author knows theory but not application of Flex 3. Hope this saves some people some coins. Not sure who wrote the reviews before this but I don't think they used the book to try and solve any real world solutions.
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