Others say...

"GREAT book!"
I wasn't too convinced about this book @ the beginning. It really is perfect for any beginners, and those seeking to get familiar w/Flex. I've been designing/coding in Flash for almost a decade now, and this book sure made the transition allot easier. The only reason I gave it a 4 and not a 5 is because the examples are all related, so if you're into building up the same example as you progress thru the book, this is perfect.

"Flex 2.0 Training from the Source"
Invested way more time in this book than I thought I would, ... received way more value that I predicted I would.

After quite a few weeks of trying to find time to finish up the last couple of chapters in this book I am now just finding time to write a review that I thought would be completed way before now. Between the full-time job and other projects, it has been difficult to wrap this one up ... but I am glad that I did. Just in time for the v3.0.

About the Authors: At first glance of the Bios section you will know that the authors of this book are way more than qualified. Jeff Tapper was on the MAX conference stage last year and I have personally attended the Adobe Authorized Flex Train the Trainer event with Matt Boles. (excellent instructor and technical expert to say the least) The other authors I have not met but they have well recognized names in the industry.

This book is 581 pages and consists of 25 task driven chapters that walk you through an entire project from start to finish. (The Flex Grocer) It follows the traditional "Macromedia Training from the Source" format and is very well written. The TFS book series has always been a personal favorite of mine and they are typically tightly coded with consistent quality. It makes me very unhappy to imagine that the TFS books will cease to exist or even more frightfully be replaced by the Classroom in a Book series. We'll see what happens?

The book is almost error free and there is a site that the authors have published that references any errata. The book eases you into working with simple XML data structures and controls and moves you toward FDS and also includes data management with CFCs. There is a nice introduction to the value object pattern as well as ActionScript if you may be new to either of these topics. You will probably need a supplemental book if you are not familiar with ActionScript.

I had already attended the five day Flex Train the Trainer session before I started on this book and my goal of working through this book was to make sure that everything started to sink in within a reasonable time frame after attending the class. Some of the concepts or items that I found to be of high value included a refresher on event flow and event bubbling, formatters and validators, and the history manager. Lesson 18 was my first introduction to charting data in Flex and as you probably would guess, Flex makes this a cakewalk.

No doubt this book is a FIVE STAR. I am sure that the authors have plans of updating it for Flex 3.0.



"Excellent step by step but exhausting to follow."
This book does a great job at providing carefully checked step by step exercises. On that level it is 5 stars. I am on chapter 8 and found no errors and I type in the code examples. However I did find unexpected results - mentioned later. There is a lot of meticulous checking to be sure the progression of the examples are correct.

The content also shows a professional developer approach to applying the technology. This does not appear to be a book written from another language's perspective such as an Actionscript programmer trying to write a Flex book. The author is focused on Flex and exposing the functionality in how you best would apply it. So I would say the content is top notch, but again I am the student and this is my professional developer gut experience making the call.

This book uses one grocery store shopping cart example all the way through. This is boring as heck to see that example chapter after chapter. Now the book does provide starting files for each chapter in case you messed up. However the authors were forced to add more and more to support the development of the application. This resulted in situations such as chapter 7 that went way overboard to complete the progression of the application to the end. Rather than focusing efforts on specifics of Flex you were repeating work to support the app. You would say enough already. Chapter 7 took me 3 hours to complete as it predicts in the beginning. It could have been writted for 1 hour and covered the lesson points about components and provided a larger variety of examples.

You also are doing things to support the progression of the application that later you undo for changing architecture. This makes understanding the application more difficult.

Despite the effort to provide start files at the beginning of each lesson, there are intermediate exercise steps with testing points within the lessons. There are no files to support you if you error or if there are errors in the exercise steps. One I came across is Lesson 8. The first "Displaying the Categories Using a HorizontalList and ItemRender" did not work for me. This prevented me from starting the next section in the lesson. I went over and over the steps. Stuck for 1 hour I finally deleted all the project files and started over and it worked. Would have been nice to have samples of what I should have had at the end of that segment, so I will not know what went wrong.

I went to the site for the book to see if there was an errata. There was not and there is no place to provide feedback for this type of item. Hey book companies (live errata like live docs moderated) increases quality of your technical products.

The book is not a sit down and read as some of the exercise steps can be as many as 20 or more. There is good annotation for the steps but not enough to read very long without becoming fully lost. I would say you cannot read any of the lessons (after the first few) all the way through and understand them without doing them and practicing.

I would not recommend using the Flex SDK to try to absorb this book. You really need Flexbuilder to be productive in following the book. The exercises can be done with just the SDK, just be prepared for a longer work period.

I see comments that the book is for advanced and then for beginners. You do have to have programming experience to follow the book.

I am an advanced Flash AS2 and now AS 3 developer. I wanted to get the gist of Flex for back end AS apps. It has been difficult with this book and I would say I am lost in the example most of the time. I have done the Quick Starts at the Adobe site which do have smaller simpler to follow exercises before I ventured into this book.

Bottom line, this is a great step by step book the shows off Flex features for building a shopping cart application. It covers a wide range of Flex features. It is error checked and provides useful commentary in the steps.

The exercises are way too long to keep focus if you follow along. There is no variety so boooooring.


"Jump into Flex!"
The book is geared toward experienced developers looking to jump into Flex development. Flex can be challenging for developers who are used to the traditional page based architecture of web applications. This book does a great job of demonstrating the differences. It also briefly covers some advanced topics like shared objects and skinning. This book is not a complete guide, but it does provide a good primer so that you can easily move onto more advanced training.

"Not for experienced developers..."
If you are a newbie and like to have your hand held at each step, then this book is for you. However, if you are an experienced developer, the constant step 1, step 2, ...step n approach can be extremely annoying and distracting. At least it was for me.

For experienced developers looking to quickly ramp up on Flex 2, I would recommend "Programming Flex 2" by Kazoum & Lott instead. It gave better explanations of the options available and when one was more appropriate than the other.