K. Nair said
This book is good for some one starting to learn Flex.You don't need ActionScript experience to understand this book. It has lots and lots of examples you can try with. I didn't put 5 stars because it does not cover advanced topics on designining applications using a framework like Cairngorm or implementing BlazeDS.
But I would really recommend this as a good book to for starting on Flex and cover all the fundamentals of Flex.
RonD69 said
This book is well thought out. As the book walks us through in building an e-commerce website, concepts and principles are introduced in ever-complex order. For example, the book walks you through in creating a combobox that connects to a static array in the early chapters; and then revisits that same combobox and connects to a remote service like an http service tag.
I'm glad I made this purchase. It's ideal for a hobbyist, which I am, trying to build a professional-looking personal website.
I would've given this book 5-stars, but I had a difficult time locating a certain solution as I build my website. The index in the back and the table of contents need some attention. I was trying to find a way to number format a column in a datagrid/advanceddatagrid to have display leading zeros. Finally I had to purchase the Flex 3 Cookbook that's nothing but examples after examples of common issues a programmer might come across.
Don't get me wrong this book is great, but it needed to be paired up with a pure reference book like the Cookbook I purchased. Together, the look/feel/feature-set of my website is only limited to my imagination.
AmazonBuyer said
This book teaches Flex by walking the reader through building an ecommerce application. That's one application throughout the entire book. Learning a computer language this way sounds great at first, but when you get down to the nitty gritty, it definitely will not be for everyone.
Half of the book consists of instructions on what to key in and where, all for the purpose of building this ecommerce application. That's a lot of pages which could've been used for teaching more Flex rather than building an application that the reader may or may not care about. Having said that, the advantage of this approach is that because the application is bigger in size and complexity than the usual tidbit-sized examples typical of other texts, the reader gets to see examples more representative of real world coding.
Going to my actual experience, I had to occasionally step away from this book for a few days, sometimes a week or so. Trying to continue where I left off wasn't as easy because I found myself forgetting the "trend of thought" of the ecommerce application. This was especially true when I reached the middle of the book. Because I didn't have the time to reread much of the earlier chapters, I just plodded along; I have to say I began to feel the drudgery of typing in code that I'm no longer sure how it fit in the overall, and it all began to feel like a price I had to pay just to see the effect of Flex features being discussed.
Despite all that, I still did learn from this book, and the articulation of the Flex features was pretty clear. I like the way the authors explained the concepts, and if it were based wholly on that, I'd give this book 5-stars. Unfortunately, the format picked, that of building one application throughout the entire book did not serve me that well. Perhaps if I had straight time to read the book from beginning to end, I would've felt differently.
S. Polireddy said
Nice Intro material with a real world application, but the problem is too much concentration on the application would make you lost on the actual concepts in using Flex. A good read for beginners..
Kevin Carlson said
A drawback of any training book that focuses on building one big application is that recovery can be difficult if the reader makes any errors while entering the code.
Using this book is more like taking dictation than learning. Therefore, locating code entry errors is more problematic then it ought to be, especially for beginners. The supplied CD does allow you to copy the completed chapter code over your own, so that you can start again with the following chapter, but this approach is less than satisfying to me.
Adobe would do well to take a lesson from Wrox, whose bite-size examples I find much better suited to self-teaching.
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