Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source

One thing you can’t accuse Adobe of is being skimpy with documentation. There is a huge amount of free documentation on the Flex framework and associated technologies such as AIR, Flash and Adobe’s Flex IDE, Flex Builder. So what, you might wonder, is the point of yet more Adobe documentation, this time in the form of 670+ page paperback?

To be honest, most of the information in this book is available elsewhere - either somewhere inside Adobe’s PDF technical documentation, online in its Flex Developer Centre or, well, somewhere out there on the Internet. The point of this book is not that it contains unique or difficult-to-find material but that it presents that material in the form of a well-structured tutorial, leading the user through the basics of Flex development and onto ever more complex topics. Along the way, it develops a fully functional Flex application (an online grocery store) with a Flash front-end. All the code of this application is provided on a CD accompanying the book.

While this book doubtless contains some information that will be useful even to existing users who are moving to Flex 3 from earlier versions, the book principally addresses newcomers to Flex development. It guides the novice through all the fundamental features: design using MXML, programming with ActionScript, creating custom components, working with web services and so on.

I should say that while the authors point out that Flex development can be done using the free tools provided with the Flex SDK, they (quite reasonably) work on the assumption that the reader will be following along using Flex Builder 3.

Overall, this is a very useful book. In spite of the grocery store application that is developed throughout the text, the chapters are generally pretty ‘self contained’ so that readers (like me) who prefer to dip into a book rather than follow along in strict sequence, shouldn’t have too many problems.

Perhaps my main complaint is that there is very limited coverage of Adobe’s new AIR framework for creating standalone desktop applications. AIR is covered in one small chapter. This is a shame since AIR is in essence a ‘variety’ of Flex and I would have liked to have seen an in-depth discussion of the differences between the AIR and standard Flex class libraries and tools. In most other respects, however, this is a very satisfying book that does a good job of untangling the complexities of Flex development.