Flex 3 Cookbook Code-Recipes, Tips, and Tricks for RIA Developers

Reviewed by Robert Pritchett

 

Authors: Joshua Noble, Todd Anderson O'Reilly http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529857/index.html Released: May 2008 $45 USD Pages: 704 ISDN 13: 9780596529857   Strengths: 1   Weaknesses: 1   Flex Developer Center: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/

 

Introduction

 

The best way to showcase a powerful new technology is to demonstrate its real-world results, and that's exactly what this new Cookbook does with Adobe Flex 3.

 

Wide ranging and highly practical, Flex 3 Cookbook contains more than 300 proven recipes for developing interactive Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 sites. You'll find everything from Flex basics, to solutions for working with visual components and data access, to tips on application development, unit testing, and using Adobe AIR.

 

You also get ideas from the development community. Through its Flex Cookbook website (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/ ), Adobe invited Flex developers to post their own solutions for working with this technology, and from hundreds of posts, the authors chose the best and most useful solutions to supplement Flex 3 Cookbook.

 

Each recipe inside provides a solution to a common problem, explains how and why it works, and offers sample code that you can put to use immediately. Topics include:

 

á      Containers and dialogues

á      Working with Text

á      Data driven components

á      DataGrid and Advanced DataGrid

á      ItemRenderers and Editors

á      Images, bitmaps, videos, and sounds

á      CSS, styling, and skinning

á      States and effects

á      Working with Collections, arrays, and DataProviders

á      Using DataBinding

á      Validation, formatting, and regular expressions

á      Using Charts and data visualization

á      Services and Data Access

á      Using RSLs and Modules

á      Working with Adobe AIR

                   

Whether you're a committed Flex developer or still evaluating the technology, you'll discover how to get quick results with Flex 3 using the recipes in this Cookbook. It's an ideal way to jumpstart your next web application.

 

 

What I Learned

 

There is an awful lot I don't know and Adobe Flex is intended to make web 2.0 development a little easier. I don't really know if it does that or not, but that is why O'Reilly created the Cookbook series. In the Adobe Developer Library.

 

Because Flex Framework is so huge, there are an additional 76 pages of recipes posted at the O'Reilly website for this book listed above.

 

This book does a good job tying the pieces together and if the recipes don't work, you will be sure that O'Reilly will post the errata accordingly. That is what makes the O'Reilly site so attractive. The books are current as long as there is an Internet.

 

While the Flex 3 Pocketbook is for those who want to get their feet wet, this book is designed for those with a little more experience under their belt.

 

Flex apps bring together ActionScript and MXML into a cohesive whole. Do I understand it all? No, but since I deal a lot with Adobe CS 3 and Dreamweaver, it behooves me to take action and learn a bit about Flex 3.

 

Conclusions

 

For those who want to not just jump in feet first, but go through a baptism of fire with Flex 3, this is the 2^nd book to get to figure out what Adobe is doing regarding Web site and desktop app development.