The Essential Guide to Flex 3 (Essential Guide)

enlarge

Author: Charles E Brown
Publisher: friends of ED
Category: Book

List Price: ~~$54.99~~
Buy New: $34.48
You Save: $20.51 (37%)

New (25) from $34.48

Avg. Customer Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

3 reviews
Sales Rank: 53824

Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 600
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2
Dimensions (in): 8.8 x 7.3 x 1

ISBN: 1590599500
Dewey Decimal Number: 006
EAN: 9781590599501
ASIN: 1590599500

Publication Date: May 26, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: International shipping available
Condition: Brand New, Perfect Condition, Please allow 4-14 business days for delivery. 100% Money Back Guarantee, Over 1,000,000 customers served.

Similar Items:

•	Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source
•	Flex 3 Cookbook: Code-Recipes, Tips, and Tricks for RIA Developers (Adobe Developer Library)
•	Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential) (Essential)
•	Learning Flex 3: Getting up to Speed with Rich Internet Applications (Adobe Developer Library)
•	Adobe AIR: Create - Modify - Reuse (Programmer to Programmer)

Editorial Reviews:

Product Description

Flex 3 is the next generation of a technology that revolutionized web applications. It is the next evolutionary step of Flash, which has grown from a web animation medium to a powerful enterprise web design and development platform. With nearly 98% of all web browsers, and a growing number of mobile devices, running Flash Player, a knowledge of Flex is indispensible for any serious web developer.

This book will show you how to create powerful Rich Internet Applications using Flex 3. After learning how to install and becoming familiar with the basics of the Flex Builder 3 software, you will explore in depth how the Flash scripting language, ActionScript 3.0, interacts with Flex's powerful XML-like design language: MXML.

You'll learn how to construct your applications using layout and navigation containers, and how to move between various states using transitions. There is coverage of how best to plan your applications and use the Model-View-Controller pattern to keep various aspects of development separated and ease creation of potentially complicated projects.

Rich Internet Applications rely on data, and this book shows how to bring data from various sources into your Flex application and check its integrity, and how best to display and interact with it.

Going farther, applications built for the Flash platform can now exist and function beyond the traditional confines of the web browser. Adobe AIR allows you to take your applications to the desktop, and this book shows how to reapply your Flex skills to take advantage of this new environment.

The Essential Guide to Flex 3 takes you through all the powerful features of Flex using a series of stand-alone, practical exercises. The skills acquired throughout the book are then brought together in the form of a full-featured case study application showcasing essential techniques that can easily be applied to your own Flex applications.

In this book you'll

Learn how to create powerful applications using Adobe Flex 3
Use Flex Builder to design layouts using Flex MXML containers, and see how to combine MXML and ActionScript 3.0
Work your way through a full-featured case study, building a complete Flex application
Connect Flex to the ColdFusion application server, creating Flex applications powered by dynamic server-side code
Take your web applications to the desktop using Adobe AIR

Summary of Contents

Chapter 1: Flex Basics
Chapter 2: Flex and Flex Builder 3
Chapter 3: ActionScript
Chapter 4: Containers
Chapter 5: Events and Components
Chapter 6: Flex and XML
Chapter 7: Formatting and Cascading Style Sheets
Chapter 8: The Repeater Component
Chapter 9: Drag and Drop
Chapter 10: Case Study: Part 1
Chapter 11: Case Study: Part 2
Chapter 12: Flex and Data
Chapter 13: Printing
Chapter 14: Charting
Chapter 15: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

Customer Reviews:

4 out of 5 stars

Good book overall (my exact rating is 3.75 stars) July 22, 2008
2 out of 3 found this review helpful

If you don't know Flex 3 and want to learn the basics and then some, well then this book might just be for you. The author takes you through Installing Eclipse and Flex Builder 3 (FB3) which I found very informing. He then takes you through some of the different areas in FB3. The chapter on ActionScript (Chapter 3) is not a very good one. You will need a different book for ActionScript reference. You then go through some of the "essentials" of Flex 3 to understand how to build an application.

I was a bit confused at times but it might have been because of the speed I was going through this book. If I would have slowed down a bit, I think it would have been a lot clearer. Also, I am new to Flex so it was learning from scratch for me.

This book does not come with the files, nor can you download them. I really think if it had the files it would have been a MUCH better read/work along. There are a few errors in the code and you have to guess at times as to what it should be. I could not get one section to work at all (as was shown in the book).

If you want to learn Flex 3 or get a better understanding of Flex 3, then I would tell you to read this book. The information you will learn far outweighs the few errors and lack of files. I've always said the best way to learn code, is to sit down and type it out. You will be doing a lot of this. Good job Charles!

4 out of 5 stars

Good Start July 7, 2008
3 out of 4 found this review helpful

Good Book. Would have raised rating to 4 1/2 stars if that was an option.
Enjoyed reading and doing the exercises. Not many errors, few but they where small. Wish Chapter 15 (AIR) would have been a little longer with more detail.

All in all, a good start. Introduced to many topics, ColdFusion was a good one.

Thanks

5 out of 5 stars

Flex at its finest! June 7, 2008
5 out of 8 found this review helpful

I have learned a great deal from this book. Along with taking a course with the author and reading this book I have learned how to do things the correct way and have reaped the rewards from it. I would recommend this book to anyone looking to learn Flex quickly and/or catch up on whats new in Flex 3.