Customer Reviews

AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I would not recommend buying this book. Most of the code examples in the book have compile errors so it's obvious that the authors didn't spend much time on this book. Also, I think the authors included way too much source code and not nearly enough explanation. And quite a lot of the source code that they include is stuff that is copied directly from open source Flex projects (such as PureMVC, Cairngorm, etc), so you don't gain anything by having it in the book. I especially disliked the pages and pages or SQL code that they included in the streaming audio/video chapter.

This isn't the worst book I've read, but you could do a lot better.

A good book indeed, which is directed to Advanced Flex Developers, as the name implies.

However the code download provided is full of typos and inconsistencies...
So if you are a learn-by-example guy as I am, you may not very pleased with it. Besides, these samples when they rely on server-side languages are so diverse that you spend more time setting up your server than actually learning the client-side (Flex) part : Ruby on Rails, Java, PHP, you name it.

A good book overall, as there aren't many other advanced books regarding Flex.

--
Olivier C.
Adobe Flex Certified Developer

This title was published in a series called "Friends of Ed". I think what these authors need to do is forget about Ed and make friends with an Editor. A really patient and energetic editor, because there is a lot of work to be done here. My guess is that this book was a severe rush job by the authors and/or publishers. The prose is tortured, organization is sloppy and there are just too many technical errors to even keep track of. The technical error to page ratio is pretty close to unity. Seriously, that's no joke, flip to a random page and you will likely find a technical error (or two). The only joke here is the use of the word "Advanced" in the title. Haha, guys, you got me. Fortunately, paper can be burned for energy or else this book would be a total waste. Bleh.

This is not one of the many books which plain how to use a checkbox etc. Thats the best thing about this book.

Book starts directly with design patterns. Not only does it talk about concepts but it explains clearly (using code) how to use them.
As a developer for me the first two sections are quite useful. One can directly apply those concepts in any enterprise RIA.
The data binding and custom component concepts are 2 things which i am about to use right away for my work.

The thing i do not like about this book is that teh code snippets are not consistent and incorrect sometimes.
That is the reason i cannot give 5 stars to this book.

I would suggest this book to anyone who knows the basics and is trying to create large enterprise RIAs.

In this book I've find a nice depth of the details. A book very well structured, well edited and elegantly descriptive. Just a little difficult for me who are young developer in FLEX and RIA application. The images and examples are very useful for understanding situations to learn.