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The Essential Guide to Flex 3 (Essential Guide)

By Charles E Brown

Media: Book (Paperback, 600 pages)
ISBN: 1590599500
Publisher: friends of ED
Release Date: May 26, 2008

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Product Description

Flex 3 is the next generation of a technology that revolutionized web applications. It is the next evolutionary step of Flash, which has grown from a web animation medium to a powerful enterprise web design and development platform. With nearly 98% of all web browsers, and a growing number of mobile devices, running Flash Player, a knowledge of Flex is indispensible for any serious web developer.

This book will show you how to create powerful Rich Internet Applications using Flex 3. After learning how to install and becoming familiar with the basics of the Flex Builder 3 software, you will explore in depth how the Flash scripting language, ActionScript 3.0, interacts with Flex's powerful XML-like design language: MXML.

You'll learn how to construct your applications using layout and navigation containers, and how to move between various states using transitions. There is coverage of how best to plan your applications and use the Model-View-Controller pattern to keep various aspects of development separated and ease creation of potentially complicated projects.

Rich Internet Applications rely on data, and this book shows how to bring data from various sources into your Flex application and check its integrity, and how best to display and interact with it.

Going farther, applications built for the Flash platform can now exist and function beyond the traditional confines of the web browser. Adobe AIR allows you to take your applications to the desktop, and this book shows how to reapply your Flex skills to take advantage of this new environment.

The Essential Guide to Flex 3 takes you through all the powerful features of Flex using a series of stand-alone, practical exercises. The skills acquired throughout the book are then brought together in the form of a full-featured case study application showcasing essential techniques that can easily be applied to your own Flex applications.

In this book you'll

Learn how to create powerful applications using Adobe Flex 3
Use Flex Builder to design layouts using Flex MXML containers, and see how to combine MXML and ActionScript 3.0
Work your way through a full-featured case study, building a complete Flex application
Connect Flex to the ColdFusion application server, creating Flex applications powered by dynamic server-side code
Take your web applications to the desktop using Adobe AIR

Summary of Contents

Chapter 1: Flex Basics
Chapter 2: Flex and Flex Builder 3
Chapter 3: ActionScript
Chapter 4: Containers
Chapter 5: Events and Components
Chapter 6: Flex and XML
Chapter 7: Formatting and Cascading Style Sheets
Chapter 8: The Repeater Component
Chapter 9: Drag and Drop
Chapter 10: Case Study: Part 1
Chapter 11: Case Study: Part 2
Chapter 12: Flex and Data
Chapter 13: Printing
Chapter 14: Charting
Chapter 15: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

Totally worth the money.

I totally loved this Flex book. I've read almost all the books on Flex and this is definitely one book that is worth your money. Even if you are a total beginner to Flex, it provides really useful information about the soft and it even takes you trough the installation process ( step by step ) and the examples are just great.

Great book, worth every penny.

Submitted 11 Nov 2008

Great Book

I have this book and got it after taking a Flex Class that Charles Brown taught. I have referred to the book numerous times to point me in the right direction for the application I am working on and also to help me better understand why something works the way it does.

Submitted 10 Oct 2008

Absolutely perfect (almost)

This is one of the most well-written books I have ever read. I have been programming JavaScript for several years, so I assume that makes learning ActionScript fairly easy for me. Nevertheless, this is a good introductory book to Flex 3. All of the examples work flawlessly. The only thing wrong with the book are some unbelievably huge typographical errors, but they are easy to spot and easy to decipher. Sometimes you have to look at the example code from the website to get the correct text. The errors have not caused me any problems and I would highly recommend this book to anyone new to Flex 3.

Submitted 6 Oct 2008

Good book overall (my exact rating is 3.75 stars)

If you don't know Flex 3 and want to learn the basics and then some, well then this book might just be for you. The author takes you through Installing Eclipse and Flex Builder 3 (FB3) which I found very informing. He then takes you through some of the different areas in FB3. The chapter on ActionScript (Chapter 3) is not a very good one. You will need a different book for ActionScript reference. You then go through some of the "essentials" of Flex 3 to understand how to build an application.

I was a bit confused at times but it might have been because of the speed I was going through this book. If I would have slowed down a bit, I think it would have been a lot clearer. Also, I am new to Flex so it was learning from scratch for me.

This book does not come with the files, nor can you download them. I really think if it had the files it would have been a MUCH better read/work along. There are a few errors in the code and you have to guess at times as to what it should be. I could not get one section to work at all (as was shown in the book).

If you want to learn Flex 3 or get a better understanding of Flex 3, then I would tell you to read this book. The information you will learn far outweighs the few errors and lack of files. I've always said the best way to learn code, is to sit down and type it out. You will be doing a lot of this. Good job Charles!

Submitted 22 Jul 2008

Good Start

Good Book. Would have raised rating to 4 1/2 stars if that was an option.
Enjoyed reading and doing the exercises. Not many errors, few but they where small. Wish Chapter 15 (AIR) would have been a little longer with more detail.

All in all, a good start. Introduced to many topics, ColdFusion was a good one.

Thanks

Submitted 7 Jul 2008