Programming Flex 3: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex (Programming)

List Price: $54.99 Discount Price: $31.18

Customer Reviews:

A must have for every Flex Developer! [Posted on 2008-09-30]
I just got my copy of Programming Flex 3 in the mail yesterday and have already found it to be extremely useful! Like most titles in O'Reilly's "Adobe Developer Library" series, the book is very well organized and contains useful and understandable examples. One thing that Joey and Chafic have done very well is to keep the chapters focused, not bloating them with unnecessary technical jargon that may confuse readers who are new to Flex. This is not to say that this book is by any means only for beginners, as it dives into many advanced topics, it just does it in such a way that it will be easily understood by reader of any skill level.

As the title suggests, I believe that this book will be a valuable asset to any flex developer, and it has found a permanent home on my desk next to my copies of The Flex 3 Cookbook (Flex 3 Cookbook: Code-Recipes, Tips, and Tricks for RIA Developers (Adobe Developer Library)), The Actionscript 3 Cookbook (ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook: Solutions for Flash Platform and Flex Application Developers), and Essential Actionscript 3 (Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential) (Essential)). If you are looking to learn Flex from the ground up, or would simply like a very good reference manual covering all of the topics that you will most likely encounter on a day to day basis, then I would highly recommend this book!

Good content but poor correlation [Posted on 2008-10-15]
I'm only about a quarter of the way through the book, but have already noticed some things.

The book's content is great. Its very thorough and covers a lot of useful material.

Unfortunately, the authors miss the mark on correlating their examples to their figures. Most of the code examples have no figure to show what the code renders. And most of the figures that are there, don't correlate to the code examples.

Flex 3 book with it's own unique strengths [Posted on 2008-10-22]
This book has many things to commend it, and in particular it is very strong on:
* The internal startup sequence of a Flex application
* Loading one Flex application into another Flex application
* Working with fonts
* Programmatic skinning
* Runtime CSS
* Building custom components

I think the book is weak on a few things as well, such as the Flex Builder IDE and remoting. In reference to remoting, the authors make the following surprising statement on page 471:
"Several of the remoting gateway products have added support for a Flex data component called RemoteObject. However, because we have found no practical use for RemoteObject, we are omitting any discussion of RemoteObject".
Well, I must report that I have found a practical use for it: namely, it's one of the central objects in Blaze DS and LCDS remoting. If you want to learn how to use it, you'll have to read Flex 3 Bible (12 pages on it), Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex & Java (referenced on 41 pages), or Adobe's help contents.

I believe these authors have a slight tendency to favor ActionScript and Flash APIs over MXML and Flex APIs, a preference that a reader can either choose to follow or not. I don't believe this book would be as good for novice Flex users as some of the others I have read. I think that when authors delve into relatively arcane, advanced features of an API before they get to the common simple things, it tends to make it harder for beginners. For example, here within the first 100 pages of a 600 page book they cover class introspection, loading one Flex application into another, application domains, and resource bundles... all before the novice reader has even been introduced to a simple CheckBox control. The order in which they cover topics is pretty much preserved from "Programming Flex 2", except for the fact that the chapter on application components has been moved forward quite a bit.

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