1 Chapter 1: Learning Flex Builder Adobe® Flex® BuilderTM includes a variety of resources to help you learn the program quickly and become proficient in creating Flex applications. All the Flex and Flex Builder documentation is available in online help and Adobe PDF. Topics Using Flex and Flex Builder documentation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Getting the most from the Flex and Flex Builder learning resources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Using the Flex Builder help system. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Using Flex and Flex Builder documentation The Flex and Flex Builder documentation includes information for users who have a variety of backgrounds. This section helps you understand how to approach the documentation, depending on your background and what you want to accomplish with Flex and Flex Builder. New users · Start by going to the Flex Getting Started Experience site, which gives you an overview of essential Flex concepts and provides a series of tutorial lessons. · Flex Builder is built on Eclipse (an open source IDE), so you need to know specific terms and concepts to be successful using it. For more information, see "Flex Builder Workbench Basics" on page 10 and especially "About the workbench" on page 10. Web application designers · Start by going to the Flex Getting Started Experience site, which gives you an overview of essential Flex concepts and provides a series of tutorial lessons. · You can define a user interface entirely in code using the MXML editor in Source mode; however, in Design mode, Flex Builder contains design and layout tools that make designing Flex applications much easier. For more information, see "Flex Development perspective in Design mode" on page 16 and "Building a Flex User Interface" on page 64. Experienced web application developers · Start by going to the Flex Getting Started Experience site, which gives you an overview of essential Flex concepts and provides a series of tutorial lessons. · For all the details of the Flex framework, including code samples, see the Adobe Flex 3 Developer Guide. · For in-depth information about the steps involved in building and deploying a Flex application, see Building and Deploying Adobe Flex 3 Applications. · If you are using Flex Builder as your IDE and want a quick overview of the capabilities and features of the Flex Builder workbench, see the following topics: · · · "What you can do with Flex Builder" on page 7 "About Flex Builder projects" on page 27 "About code editing in Flex Builder" on page 102