6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
It's Worth book to buy it., May 23, 2010
This review is from: Enterprise Development with Flex: Best Practices for RIA Developers (Adobe Dev Lib) (Paperback)
Just finish reading the last book from Yakov Fain, Victor Rasputnis and Anatole Tartakovsky.
Book, is quite a bit of a new revamp from first book of same authors, I love the way they write and in a level of how they manage the subject of each chapter.
And as I know them since 2004 not good enough to retribution to them and to you a book review about it.
The book itself it's worth enough just because of chapter 5,7 and 8. I will detail later bellow.
The Chapter 6 it's interesting but doubt with some aspect for example a deep example of using GraniteDS, WebOrb for Java where has many options to who uses Java in the back-end. Code-gen, Data Sync, EBJ3 support, among other improvements that product changed from past years. It should show a much more examples of integration, not just WebOrb but cover also ColdFusion which is missing too in the chapter.
On Chapter 5 I liked the way they talk about resending the channel back which is not very well documented in the official BlazeDS developer guide. That's made a chapter worth enough just to clarify that for anyone who buys this book.
On Chapter 7 will help you with modules, but don't to except much from it, it's still a thing that we need to handle it, but not 100% that will works fine. But this chapter definitely will help you pass throw some of basic and intermediate problems in real life projects, There's also a just little detail that authors could added on the book where is the Potomac aka. OSGi in Flex application, where it's a seamless integration OSGi on Flex apps, that could be added to the book, specially if you're a Java developer, you're used to use OSGi on yours first class projects.
Chapter 8 it's a well written, and will help you understand process of reduce memory consumption, but has many limitations on describing the chapter, an example of that. I missed using FlexPMD to identify problems or bad practices on your code, which is very valuable to enterprise application and collaboration development. But one of pages that I most liked was, when they mentioned RSL for modules, which completes the chapter 7, that's a must read part.
Printing in Flex is really hassle, and I believe on next release they could increase of easy access API to printing, in AIR 2.0 for example we gain a lot of new API improvements and new capabilities, but still missing some of it on Flash player way, Chapter 11 helps you to understand both sides of coin, on generating PDF on client side and server side.
There are many other subjects that might attract your attention, but for my needs, theses were most valuables chapters of book and my opinion on what I've get reading it. Authors does really have domain on the subject, but should added theses topics that I mentioned, to the developer who are border by non very useful Flex books titles.
Thanks Yakov, Victor and Anatole, you guys wrote a book that does really add value to the Flex community, specially for who uses Flex with Java back-end like me.
It's worth to buy it? Sure, if you take seriously, not just hype, but seriously about development, theses chapters I mentioned will catch you up.
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3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Content, June 16, 2010
This review is from: Enterprise Development with Flex: Best Practices for RIA Developers (Adobe Dev Lib) (Paperback)
Very clearly written with lots of in-depth material and plenty of references to chase up on the web. It starts out assuming that you are writing database line of business applications rather than websites. If you are a professional developer writing business systems, this is the most relevant and clearly written Flex book that I have read. The technical nature of the material and the fast moving field will make this book out of date fairly quickly however, so if you are reading this positive review in 2012, you should probably temper it somewhat.
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7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some great in-depth info, July 13, 2010
This review is from: Enterprise Development with Flex: Best Practices for RIA Developers (Adobe Dev Lib) (Paperback)
Overall, this book has a lot of really useful info that you won't find in other Flex books...actually a lot of the content I haven't seen anywhere at all, so props for that. Chapter 7's tip on bootstrapping libraries as applications is very slick, and exactly the type of thing I expected from this book.
There were a few points I didn't really like as well. First, the book starts up comparing Flex frameworks and talking about some design patterns. I'm taking the point of view that the book is supposed to cover advanced topics for advanced Flex developers, so the target audience should already have a good handle on these things...so the first couple of chapters are basically wasted content, and could have been put to better use (did we really need a section on embeddng content with SWFObject?)
Second, it felt like a good chunk of the book covered messaging with LiveCycle, and had an overall Java-centric slant to it. I guess in this case it's just a matter of what the author's typical development scenario is like versus my own. Some parts were irrelevant, but generally when I see too much of a Java influence in these books and tutorials and such, my eyes tend to glaze over and I really start to tune out. I really would have like to seen more focus on things like custom Ant builds and continuous integration...generally an expansion on a lot of the content of chapter 4 that was glossed over.
Overall though, great job by the authors. Great tips, great code samples...if you're doing, or are looking to do, any sort of serious Flex development beyond the basics I'd highly recommend it.
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