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 33 Ratings

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.

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.

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 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

Learning Flex 3 - Great Book! - 2009-06-03
Reviewer Rating:
Learning Flex 3 by Alaric Cole is a great introductory book for Adobe Flex 3. If you have some basic experience with HTML, JavaScript and CSS, then you will learn the basics of Flex rapidly using this book as a guide. Some of the areas that are taught are:

* How to use Flexbuilder
* Using MXML
* ActionScript 3
* Styling your application using CSS

However, if your professional background is in web-application development using Java or other OO languages, then you are probably more likely to skip or cross-read sections of the book. This is because the book starts out with practically no initial pre-requirements, and thus you might be familiar with some of the discussed areas.

The book gave me an excellent overview of Flex's capabilities, and they are all explained thoroughly and are easily understandable. Also, this may sound silly, but I particularly liked the refreshing fact that the book is in color, unlike most other IT books.

Furthermore, the book explained Data Binding (Chapter 7) very well. This is something I was not familiar with coming from the Java world. The chapter illustrates the concepts of one-way binding, two-way binding and making your own variables "bindable" using a metadata declaration, which is basically an annotation in Java parlance.

Another feature I liked a lot was View States (Chapter 12), which allows you to rearrange, group and reuse components within your application.

I wish the book provided more information for further reading. I understand that certain concepts are beyond the scope of this book, but it would have been nice if those had been mentioned and links or recommendations for further reading were provided.

For example, while AMF is mentioned on page 8 and on page 157 the book briefly talks about the Webservice and RemoteObject component, the book should have also mentioned BlazeDS as one of Flex's core technologies for communicating with back-end servers.

And for more complex applications, the book could have at least pointed out some of the available MVC frameworks for Flex and some pointers of where to read more about them (E.g. Cairngorm and PureMVC). Well, and then there is Degrafa, the declarative graphics framework...

While the author explains the aspects of using CSS in Flex applications very well, he could have further stressed that Flex uses a subset of CSS, which in certain areas behaves differently compared to CSS you more typically use in HTML pages. He should have enumerated some of those pitfalls.

Having said all this, these issues mentioned above are minor in nature. Overall, the book was a fun read! And particularly to Java web-developers, Flex may very well be THE contender for application user interfaces moving forward. One of the great things about Flex is that even the standard components look very good (and should be good enough to please your boss), and your application looks and behaves consistently across various browsers. Oh, and yes you can run the same application on the desktop as well (Chapter 15).

This book will definitely help you learn and master Flex, and you should be able to produce functional user interfaces quickly. In order to learn more about integrating Flex with your Spring powered back-end you may want to also consider looking at "Pro Flex on Spring" by Chris Giametta.

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