Customer Reviews

Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a great book. It is a thick volume, chock full of information on Macromedia's great Flex product... no screenshots, lengthy code listings, or other "fluff" some authors use to make their page count.

What it does have is detailed, step-by-step guide information on getting off of the ground with Flex, complete with a real world application example and downloadable code.

The only caveats I offer are:

1. This book is not for beginners. You should have previous experience in both object-oriented programming and HTML/XML prior to grabbing this one (though you don't necessarily need to be an expert).

2. If you don't know ActionScript 2.0, go ahead and buy a good ActionScript 2.0 book at the same time. I recommend Colin Moock's 'Essential ActionScript 2.0'.

3. This volume is for Flex 1.0. Flex 1.5 is already out, so the examples as printed in the book will take tweaking, though most of the tweaks are minor and well-documented on Macromedia's web site. As of this writing, the authors are updating the downloadable code examples to Flex 1.5.

4. If your looking for extensive coverage of Charts, you won't find it here (Flex 1.0 did not ship with Charting, though that is available in Flex 1.5). You'll have to figure those out independent of this book (as of this writing, this is the only book on Flex, so you'll have to rely on the docs that ship with Flex and what you can find on the web).

Bottom Line: Highly recommended if you want to learn the ins and outs of Flex.

It's a rare treat to have a collection of best practices on a new technology so early out of the gate. While the patterns themselves are not revolutionary, their application in this new context helps developers get off to a roaring start in building solid, scalable rich applications.

If you've been on the fence about diving into this new arena of rich internet applications, the book covers all the basic building blocks in the initial chapters.

From beginner to seasoned professional, this title hits it's mark.

We decided we're going to give FLEX at shot at our company. I heard this book was good, but was somewhat skeptical that the first book of a subject would be any good, it generally takes time for best practices to come about with any technology.

However I was pleasantly surprised! This book is excellent on many fronts. One, it's not padded with 500 pages of useless background information on how the internet started. It gives just enough info at the start to set what your frame of mind (whether you are a cfm, php, jsp coder or a flash developer) should be from an application architecture point of view. It then goes right into a fully functional example, a blog reader.

The example is simple enough that not knowing flex doesn't leave you confused, but gives you context for what a flex application generally looks like. Though anyone who has done any kind of application server side coding will have no problems since MXML looks just like XML and Actionscript is similar to many OO languages. The next chapters then get into the basics and progress to the nitty gritty, and having that context really helps absorb the information as you have a frame of reference.

As I write this though (10/04/2004) FLEX 1.5 is about to come out and there are some differences - so the examples will generate warnings on FLEX 1.5, but those are easy to fix.

My company decided to use Flex and so I bought this book to get started.. and I am glad I did.

This is a very good primer to get going and then the later chapters are the best I have found at actually showing you how to build TRUE enterprise level applications.

If you are new to Flex, and want to learn, and learn correctly, get this book.

A very good book, which is fortunate because it's one of the only (if not THE only) books on the subject. My only beef is not with the book, but with the product licensing--you can't deploy a free-standing SWF without a Flex server license. If you want to do Flex-like stuff (and deploy SOLO SWF's) for free, (...)

Flex 2.0 has been released, but I still find this book (Flex 1.0) an invaluable resource in developing rich client applications. There's a quick 30 page intro to Flex, and then the fun starts. You start at the Presentation tier, working your way through to the Business tier and then finally to the Integration tier of rich internet applications. This is best practice in motion. [...]

I really enjoy reading this book, in particular the chapters about J2EE and Flex.Help me understand the design patterns and motivations behind the cairngorm framework too and more importantly how to architect Flex applications.Looking forward to reading the updated version, following the new Flex 2.0.

This is an excellent book on an amazing new technology. The book is very well structured and written and contains lots of examples that go far beyond the "hello world" type of examples you expect in books on new technologies. In fact the authors provide a patterns-based framework for your Flex applications.

Webster and McLeod raised the bar for every Macromedia Press title to be released in the future and just pushed Ben Forta from its thrown as the best Macromedia Press writer.

Book with examples step-by-step of applications created in FLEX 1.0. It for installation configurations and other Flex's basic subjects. It is a book for intermediary and advanced users.
To seize well the book is necessary knowledge deepened of ActionScript. A good references is the book Object-Oriented Programming with ActionScript 2.0.
In spite of being version 2 of Flex liberate it continues to be a good references, but you will have to know exactly what changed of the version 1 to 2.

Le livre de Macromedia est un excellent document pour débuter l'apprntissage de Flex, la nouvelle technologie de Macromedia pour les RIA. Il est très précis, clairement illustré par des propos efficaces et couvre entièrement l'implantation du logiciel et de son framework. À noter que la plupart des exemples sont pour Flex 1.0 alors que la version 1.5 est disponible depuis quelques temps. Il faudra donc adopter certains exemples de code. Somme toute, c'est un excellent livre de Macromedia Press. Il vaut les quelques 60$.