Customer Reviews

Adobe AIR in Action

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1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you are flex developer and looking into AIR this book is for you. It is for beginners in AIR but flex knowledge is of great help to understand AIR.

GREAT READ!
Adobe AIR In Action is a great resource for those starting to learn the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). This book takes you from the absolute essentials, step-by-step with thoughtful screenshots to light your path to creating great AIR applications.

I was really impressed that the authors take you through everything you need or want to know in order to get up and running. For example, I have often avoided making a lot of configuration changes to the AIR app.xml file just because I did not have time to scurry around finding clear concise explanations of what effects my actions would have. Lott, et al. break it down thoroughly and completely in a section that took me about 5 minutes to fully understand all of the various settings of the config.xml file.

I am a visual learner and, in the past, spent hours looking at framework documentation ASDOCS only to realize that I didn't learn nearly what my time investment would have supported. I can say that the style of this book is very conducive to retention without "talking down" to the reader.

Coming from a Flex background, I enjoyed the many examples provided in Flex, but was especially interested in the step-by-step examples provided for people coming from a Flash CS3 background. As with all of the examples in the book, Adobe AIR In Action not only provides you with the "how" to do something, but background information on the "why" you do something (should you be interested in knowing the "why" that is).

There is an entire chapter devoted just to integrating your AIR application into your SQL database. The chapter is quite thorough, yet explained clearly and effectively.

My only criticism, if any, would have to be that I would have liked a little more in the way of network, and web service integration. Since the majority of AIR applications are distributed applications that call back to some form of data storage, I would have enjoyed a little more depth in different approaches of asynchronous server communication with your AIR application. However, the book does cover network monitoring for both HTTP and sockets.

I'm not trying to sell you anything. But I will say, that this is one of the better beginner level books I've read. Is it going to answer ALL of your questions? No. But it will give you a great head-start and sound foundational working knowledge of Adobe AIR.

Yeah, seems like a great book...if you're already familiar with SQLite. But the publisher didn't make a concerted effort to make sure ALL the source files were included on their website, thus, source code for a helper file is MISSING. Who knows what else is missing. I'm only interested in the database aspects of AIR and their SQLTutorial application wasn't included in the downloads. Further, the book was published July 2008, this is 2010, and they still haven't fixed the problem. They apparently don't pay attention to their forum on the matter because they haven't offered ANY help whatsoever. The more I write, the more frustrated I feel.

"Adobe AIR in Action" is a book that has everything you need theory, practice, advisory for you at the center of the matter. The introduction helps you understand the architecture of an AIR application.
The suite is divided into 3 parts: Flex Builder, Flash and Flex SDK. For those who want to use AIR via HTML, do not panic, Chapter 7 is dedicated to that.

Thereafter, the book explains the case of use. These include window management, transparency, full screen, use the menu ...

Chapter by chapter, we find all the basics such as access to databases, interaction with the clipboard, use the drag & drop, use sockets or file access.

Throughout the book, you can test what you learned on a sample application which is enriched and expanded in each lesson.

To understand more easily the various source code exposed, it is preferable to have some concepts of ActionScript 3.0. Beginners will find them but also the reading may be a little more difficult.

To summarize, it's a very good book. Well presented, clear, simple, interesting and really useful. Personally, I just regret that there is no explanation on the use of WebService with AIR.