How soon can you learn Adobe Flex 3? With this book's unique hands-on approach, you will be able to tinker with examples right away, and create your own Rich Internet Applications with Flex within the first few chapters. As you progress, you learn how to build a layout, add interactivity, work with data, and deploy your applications to either the Web or the desktop. Learning Flex 3 offers step-by-step instructions that are clear and concise, along with tips and tricks that author Alaric Cole has gathered after years of using Flex and teaching it to fellow developers at Yahoo! You'll understand how Flex works, how to use the MXML markup language and work with ActionScript, how to deploy RIAs to the desktop using Adobe AIR, and much more. Whether you're a beginner, or an experienced web developer coming to Flex from another platform, Learning Flex 3 is the ideal way to learn how to:

• Set up your environment with FlexBuilder and Eclipse

• Create a new Flex project

• Use the different design views in Flex

• Write code with MXML

• Lay out your Flex application

• Embed images and graphics

• Build a user interface

• Add interactivity with ActionScript

• Handle user input

• Move, display, and collect data

• Add custom components with MXML

• Add sound effects, filters, and transitions

• Style your applications with CSS, skins, and themes

• Deploy applications to the Web, or to the desktop using Adobe AIR

Also included are brief explanations of objects, classes, components, properties, methods, types, and other Flex attributes. You will find that Learning Flex 3 is not only the most complete tutorial for Flex, it's also the quickest way to get going with the latest version of this powerful framework.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 34 Ratings

Really good but not enough... - 2010-01-06
Reviewer Rating:
I wanted to learn Flex 3 so I bought Learning Flex 3 on Amazon.com to learn from scratch. This post is a review of the book.

This is my first book about learning a technology. It means that I am a beginner about getting knowledge from a book and also reading a complex technical book in english.
I am not going to review the spelling of the book but to express the possibility of improvement of the content.

[+] Colorful and clear pages
[+] Easy to read for beginners
[+] Go through a lot of knowledge...
[-] ... and not enough sometimes
[-] Start to be complex after some chapters
[-] Bad use of words resulting in frustration

[+] Colorful and clear pages
At first, the book looks clean and moreover in color which helps a lot when you need to read the source code inside.
When there might be a problem while you exercise, Alaric Cole is always using clear hints on the page side to help going through problems.

[+] Easy to read for beginners
As English as my second language I may have problems on different texts. Learning Flex 3 is easy to read and I devour the book very fast. It is the first time I enjoy that much getting new knowledge.

[+] Go through a lot of knowledge ...
The book has 283 pages. I am pretty sure that it is less than most of technical books but after reading this book, you will be able to write your own Flex application or Air application with form verifications, data providers, visual effects, CSS theming, etc.

[-] ... and not enough sometimes
If you need to create applications, you need to submit some data somewhere. With Learning Flex 3, you won't know how to do it. You are going to learn how to do forms and how to print them on your screen, but you are not going to submit them anywhere. The button submit is no use.

[-] Start to be complex after some chapters
While it might be easy to read for intermediate developers, after few chapters you will encounter some words without definitions. Alaric is using words such as instance which from a beginner point of view means nothing...

[-] Bad use of words resulting in frustration
While sometimes Alaric is not going to tell everything about some aspects, Learning Flex 3 is not about learning Flex itself, otherwise the book would have a huge amount of pages.
The book won't be enough to master Flex 3. I would say that 80% of it is about MXML which is basically a specific language to create visual interfaces. MXML is very useful but is not enough to create a Rich Internet Application. You will need to buy one or two more books to have more knowledge and be confident in developing with Flex.

To conclude, I would say that Learning Flex 3 by Alaric Cole is a good book, easy to understand and good to jump into Flex 3 but the book feels like an appetizer that you need to buy one or two more books about Action Script in order to feed your hunger.

4 stars because the book itself is really good but not perfect, I enjoyed reading it... I think it's a good book about doing interface via Flex Builder.

One the best books I've ever read - 2009-06-25
Reviewer Rating:
This is by far the best introductory Flex book on the market, for the following reasons:

1) It's in color. The judicious use of color and fonts in this book made reading the material much easier. The book is literally a work of art. This in itself sets a high bar for anyone planning to write a new tech book. But it's not just the color...

2) It's comprehensive. This book is more than just a great introduction. It covers a lot of ground--all I needed to get up to speed on a complex Flex app I took over at work.

3) It's well written. Alaric might be a programmer, but he must have double-majored in technical writing. Very few authors can write a technical book that is a pleasure to read from cover to cover. The material builds and flows, proceeding gracefully from one topic to the next, showing just the right amount of code, never more than necessary. For this the author has my gratitude.

Summary: Color would be but a novelty if the writing was bad, just as using gratuitous Flex effects would annoy a user. But Alaric isn't out to impress you with his fancy colors. He's out to teach you, and it so happens that the color is part of the means to that end. Get this book, you will not regret it.

Clear, concise . . . excellent for a beginner - 2009-11-04
Reviewer Rating:
I am new to programming and to Flex. I've purchased six books so far, worked through some on-line tutorial material, and am slowly gaining ground.

I don't know about you but I find it more than a little irritating when I read a book that lacks clarity and worse, given that the subject matter is a programming language, is riddled with typos. I have spent hours trying to get an example to work only to discover that the author left out a ">" or other key symbol. Worse, some of the examples have been cut and pasted from a completed application file in which variables have been declared elsewhere . . . not in the section of code you are studying but in something that will show up later. Arghhh! So I struggle between wondering if I'm just incompetent or is there a problem with the text. Often it's the latter . . .

But that is NOT the case with Learning Flex 3. Alaric Cole has written an excellent text that is right for the beginner that clearly and logically builds the reader's understanding of the material. The side columns contain really helpful tips and hints while the use of color greatly enhances the readability of the text. And can you believe? The code examples actually work! Are there typos? Sure, but far fewer than the other five books on my shelf :-)

If you are new to programming or this language, I can't recommend this book highly enough. While career programmers and developers will be ready for far more detail, those who accept Adobe's claim that "YOU (as in a newbie like me) can build an RIA with Flex" will find that reading this book might just help you prove Adobe's marketing team right.

Great book for teaching beginners - 2009-07-04
Reviewer Rating:
I purchased this book for two reasons: to see what items I may have overlooked while teaching myself Flex mapping applications (with Google Maps and ArcServer), and to see if it could be used to teach students with little programming background about Flex and ActionScript. On the latter point it is excellent. I plan to use this as a text in one of my courses this spring. It won't help in teaching the mapping calls, per se, but it is very good in making sure the reader understands all the parts of programming in Flex. I highly recommend it for beginning programmers or those who have not done much web development.

If you are a seasoned web developer (say, in JavaScript) and are familiar with XML, you probably can get by with the examples and help files that are freely available on the web. For beginners, I think this is gem.

Great book for learning - 2009-08-06
Reviewer Rating:
This book is a great tool for learning flex. I read it from beginning to end and by the time I was done I really had a great understanding for flex 3

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