Flex has revolutionized the development of Rich Internet Applications, giving developers the framework necessary to easily create ever more powerful applications. Components form an essential part of this framework, and once you understand how to fully use them, your productivity and creativity will be taken to a whole new level. Flex 3 Component Solutions will show just what you can achieve with components and exactly how to achieve it.

You'll see just how simple it is to use components to create amazing interfaces for your applications be they media players, data visualizations, 3D graphics—the list is long. This book contains all you need to know to get the Finally, there'll be times when you'll want to or have no alternative but to create your own components. This book will show you how to do this for your own ends, or so you can contribute to the Flex component community by distributing them.

Flex 3 Component Solutions is a tour de force of components, and all of these components are demonstrated using real-world Flex code that you can use as starting points for your own applications. Take what you learn for this book, and then go out and create your own amazing interfaces quickly and easily: reuse, repurpose, redesign, and do it all faster and with greater quality control than you ever thought possible.

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 8 Ratings

This book is about integrating components; NOT creating them. - 2009-02-13
Reviewer Rating:
If you are looking for a book that showcases a bunch of existing Flex components (that aren't a part of the standard Flex framework) then get this book and enjoy it. The book is well written and organized, and Herrington does an excellent job covering a lot of really cool components that will have people who visit your site asking, 'Wow, how'd he do that?'

If you'd like to give a more in depth answer to that question than, "I just tied this component into my app" OR if you're looking for a book that deals more in how to create cool, advanced Flex components (like I was); then you might feel a tinge of disappointment. Chapter 15 is dedicated to this topic, but it will feel like child's play to anyone who has extended UIComponent.

To anyone who has played around with the "Tour de Flex" application (http://flex.org/tour), many of the examples will seem familiar. In fact, if you enjoyed this book you'll probably enjoy exploring Tour de Flex. Though there is a lot of overlap, each also showcases components that are not in the other.

Creating components and integrating components are two very distinct (though related) topics. Before deciding to get this book, you should know that it is definitely weighted more towards integrating existing components.

Book or advertising media ? - 2009-04-27
Reviewer Rating:
Technically speaking the content of this book makes a lot of promises to those interested in advanced Flex development: It has an attractive - and well thought - title, and a lot of information that, at first glance, is of benefit for those who just stepped out of the first stages of mastering Flex 3.0 as RIA platform.
However, I would strongly advise to look carefully inside the book before buying and see if this suits you because most of the examples are built on non-standard libraries that use third-party, commercial, components. Thus, those interested in exploring the capabilities of Flex as RIA platform, their ability in reaching the promised goals and follow the development examples that the book is full of, will need to download a lot of source libraries with components and behaviours that mostly are not royalty-free. Moreover, sometimes configuring the (fat) libraries is a hassle that may even overcome the skills of the beginners.

Some namespaces provided in the examples even cannot be tracked on the web. One example is the Bubble Chart example in chapter 8 (2D Graphing Components: Introducing Charting) where the xmlns:degrafa has an invalid url (its is not degrafa.com but org) etc.

This is not a "copy-paste code and run example" kind of book ! Those who look for a steep learning curve in advanced Flex techniques will be dissapointed. IMO, the best approach in mastering a development framework is based on individual developments done by oneself instead of just copying and pasting code and, then, trying to debug in tons of code lines that might look very unfamiliar.

However, the examples are well explained and well designed and it might reach the promised objectives with additonal libraries I was talking about. It is broad, to the best definition of broadness. At it least it gives you some hints of what Flex 3.0 is capable of. ;)

So beware, look inside before you.

Excellent book (only if you want to explore your knowledge about existing components on the web) - 2009-10-19
Reviewer Rating:
How many times did you bump into your code buddy who told you "That problems bothers you? Well, there is a very good library for this.... You trying to do what?? There's already a good solution for that."
If you want to be the guy who knows all there answers, you should take a look at this book.

First of all, this book is not about creating new components for your RIA Flex application. This book is about where to find an excellent solutions and how to upgrade your existing applications with already made Flex libraries and Flex components.

I believe this book is not for beginners, but for experienced Flex developers who want to expand their knowledge of existing Flex libraries.

There is one page in the book for which I would buy this book. It contains the names and links of SWC libraries, Flex APIs and component sites that are described in this book. Perhaps it wouldn't be fair to say the content of this page :)

The first chapter talks about entering into Flex world, how to make basic GUI. If you are an experienced developer, but without any Flex experience, this could be useful, but for better understanding of this technology, try something from Adobe Library.

Next chapters will be an excellent resource for Flex developers - you will install AMFPHP functionality, get some datasets for chart display, you will learn more about component libraries, image galleries, MP3- and video players, how to implement input components with specific validation,
how to use some ILOG or QAVIS components.

This book will not teach you how to make your GUI, it will tell what's out there on the web and how to use it. I believe this book will give you some new ideas what you could implement in your Flex products.

An advertisement for ILOG - 2009-10-18
Reviewer Rating:
The book has a few examples that you can run through on your own, but not many. The remaining examples largely depend on downloading the ILOG Elixer library which is only free for developing- you have to pay quite a bit to use it in production. That being said, it's a nice advertisement for the ILOG team. I ended up selling mine back to a bookstore and looking for specific tutorials online for what I needed to do, because almost all of the data-driven examples were dependent on buy more stuff.

A broad overview that could use more depth - 2009-03-08
Reviewer Rating:
Mr. Herrington covers some very interesting open source and commercial components for Flex, but many of the components could use their own chapter or even book (the data visualization components), but are glossed over in a few pages. I have done many searches for Flex components over the 20+ months I have been developing in Flex and some of the components described in this book are new to me. I would give this book five stars for finding worthwhile components, but the depth of coverage only rates three stars much of the time. I settled on four stars because of the number of components the author exposes the reader to though, and because Flex doesn't have nearly the depth of libraries that Java has and simply discovering some of the components is worth the price of admission.

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