My company have bought several copies of this book for various employees. We use Java and Flex and looking for integration. The only optimized way to do this is with Remote Objects.

As the previous review mentioned, On page 471, on the bottom, there is a square with bear tracks on it. Look at that section ...

"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 in this chapter."

Word for word.

In other words, the author did not do his job. RemoteObjects are heavily used throughout the world and this guy can not think of a reason? Google is your friend.

While this book is great on the Flex only side, the author have failed miserably on Remoting.

This is definately a 0 (no effort provided) star review, but unfortunately, Amazon limits the minimum to 1 star ...

It is clear the authors of Programming Flex 3 worked very hard to write a comprehensive, easy-to-read publication. Their examples are great - very simple such that they highlight the concepts being presented. I have been working with Flex for a couple years but reading this book definitely brought my game up a notch based on a more clear understanding of the Flex framework, authoring components, and several other key principles.

If I had to offer one critique, I'd have liked to see some more coverage of synchronous network communication with Flex (sockets, Flash Media Server, etc.), but the dedicated chapter on AIR more than makes up for this.

this is great book for getting started with flex 3. it starts out with the basic stuff, how to build a flex application, explains controls, events, etc. works into more advanced stuff with coding samples & tricks. highly recommended.

Information provided is very helpfull to have solid understanding of inner workings of Flex. Great content within least amount of pages. Must have reference.

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.