AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) [Paperback]

Shashank Tiwari (Author), Jack Herrington (Author), Elad Elrom (Author), Joshua Mostafa (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1430210273 | ISBN-13: 978-1430210276 | Publication Date: October 23, 2008 | Edition: 1

Flex 3 is the new update from Adobe on their highly successful Flex product and this book takes a generation of Flex developers to the advanced and professional best practices in the industry.

As the size of the Flex market continues to expand and gain experience, so does the need for a book that covers all the capabilities and advanced concepts. Adobe Flex is the tool of choice for developers of rich internet applications with Web 2.0 interactivity. Version 3 brings advanced new tools and concepts to an already capable product.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Shashank Tiwari, Chief Technologist, Saven Technologies (http://www.saventech.com), a technology-driven business solutions company headquartered in Chicago, IL. As an experienced software developer and architect, he is adept in a multitude of technologies, an expert group member on a number of JCP (Java Community Process) specifications, JSRs 274, 283, 299, 301 & 312, and is an Adobe Flex Champion. Currently, he passionately builds rich high-performance applications and advises many on RIA and SOA adoption. He helps his clients in banking, money management, and financial services build robust, quantitative, data-intensive, highly interactive, and scalable applications. He writes regularly in many technical magazines, presents in seminars, mentors developers and architects, and maintains a popular blog (http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/2799). He is an ardent supporter of and contributor to open source software.

He lives with his wife and two sons in New York. More information about him can be accessed at his website (http://www.shanky.org).

Elad Elrom is the CEO of Elrom LLC, a Rich Internet Application firm. He has been managing and developing Internet based applications since the year 2000 and has consulted for sophisticated clients including MTV Networks, Vitamin Water, Weight Watchers, Davidoff and many more. He has been developing Flash application since the early Flash 5 and has been developing Flex applications since the release of Flex 2. His deep understanding of the full project cycle, as well as development in numerous programming languages, contributes to his understanding of the "big picture". In the past, Elad Elrom served in the Israeli Navy Defense Forces as part of an elite group of engineers assisting the Israeli Navy Seals. He is currently in the process of writing an advanced Flex 3.0 book called "Developing Enterprise Architect Applications."

Product Details

• Paperback: 640 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (October 23, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430210273
• ISBN-13: 978-1430210276
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,259,203 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good and quite useful, January 27, 2009

By 

Krzysztof Satola "adobers.org" (Poland) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

AdvancED Flex 3 By Elad Elrom, Jack Herrington, Joshua Mostafa, Shashank Tiwari is a very special book dedicated to Flex and AIR developers. Unlike most other Flex and AIR books available on market nowadays this book covers more advanced topics which are of great importance for rich internet applications developers upgrading professional skills from moderate to advance level.

I think this book is not ideal. There are things inside I do not like (e.g. no uniform source code convention) or I agree only to some extend. That is why my rating is 4.

I am a Flex developer and RIA architect working on software projects. My own experience tells me that multi-tier internet applications can be very complex. It is also very important to develop and deliver the applications on budget and on time which means developers should write clean, working code in an efficient way. This book can help to understand some important architectural and development topics.

Do you know how to successfully leverage architectural and design patterns in your applications? Can you construct advanced and usable components using MXML or ActionScript 3.0? Do you know how to optimize your code to get superior Flash Player performance? What about integrating your application with client- and server-side technologies like Java and PHP? Can your application communicate and interact with JavaScript and HTML? Do you know how to work with Web 2.0 APIs? Can you visualize OLAP data using Flex Charting? If not you should consider buying this book. I did and I do not regret it.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best book yet written on Flex, January 25, 2009

By 

Daniel D. Orlando "Dan Orlando" (Tempe, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

I've probably read every single book on Flex in the last two and a half years, and I have to say that this one is by far the best. It is worth noting however, that if I read this book 2 years ago, most of it would have gone over my head. This is a book for Flex developers that are sick and tired of the "this is what an ActionScript variable looks like" books, and want a book that is focused on building scalable, enterprise level Flex applications. There is an incredible amount of valuable information in this book. EVERY Flex developer should have this book in their library.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars What a mess, October 8, 2009

By 

John M. Nance - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) (Paperback)

I think an advanced Flex book should detail application architecture. We get one chapter and there's not really a point to it because they don't really compare anything. Chapter 2 talks about advanced components. Only because I already know this stuff did I understand what they were attempting to explain. Here's a line of code, hope you know where it goes. There's weird tabbing on the code, so that's difficult to follow. There's major inconsistencies on the examples from start to finish (they start with rb_selection for the name of the function and just change it to rb_selection_hangler towards the end). The code you download is deplorable. And they don't explain anything. I was done after chapter 2.

I am little shocked this was published. Friends of Ed has some great titles. I teach AS3.0 and I have been doing Flash professional for 10 years. Of all the technical books I have purchased this has to be the worst one.