Adobe Flex 2.0 Training from the Source

Flex 2.0 Training from the Source

Book Review ...

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 side 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 and I will rate it on Amazon respectively. I am sure that the authors have plans of updating it for Flex 3.0.