The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 (Essentials) [Paperback]

Charles E. Brown (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1590597338 | ISBN-13: 978-1590597330 | Publication Date: March 6, 2007 | Edition: 1st ed. 2007. Corr. 2nd printing

ActionScript 3, Flex, and Flexbuilder 2 are the hot new technologies from Adobe allowing Flash developers to build even more powerful Flash applications than ever before. This book is a comprehensive tutorial guide that will teach readers everything they need to know about these new technologies, from the very beginning, right up to advanced topics. Readers will have some general web development experience, and ideally have Flash and ActionScripting experience, although this isn't essential. Our book will be one of the first available that covers these new technologies.

Charles E Brown is an expert in Flash development and training—his in-depth knowledge of application development and effective teaching methods has been vital in producing this essential tome.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Charles Brown is one of the most noted author, consultant, and trainers in the industry today. His books about Dreamweaver and Fireworks have received critical acclaim and used worldwide as teaching tools. In addition to his work in the IT industry, Charles is also a noted concert pianist, organist, and guitarist appearing in major concert centers world-wide. He began his musical studies at age 4 and went on to study with famed pianist Vladimir Horowitz. At age 14, he made his debut with Leonard Bernstein and later studied at the famed Juilliard School. Eventually he went to Paris to study with the 20th century legend, Igor Stravinsky. While working with Stravinsky, Charles developed a close friendship with one of the most powerful artistic forces of the 20th century: Pablo Picasso. What he learned about creativity from Picasso he uses today in his writings and training work. Charles is a certified Macromedia/Adobe trainer who is in heavy demand worldwide. He frequently speaks at major conferences such as MAX and NAB. You can see his blog at blog.charlesebrown.net and his website can be found at CharlesEBrown.net.

Product Details

• Paperback: 520 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1st ed. 2007. Corr. 2nd printing edition (March 6, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590597338
• ISBN-13: 978-1590597330
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (41 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,221,625 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

I am an author with several books available about internet design and programming. My books are:

Beginning Dreamweaver MX 2004
Fireworks MX 2004 - Zero to Hero

I was also a contributor to The Marcromedia Studio MX Bible.

In addition, I am a classical pianist, guitarist, and organist.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thorough and Procedural, March 20, 2007

By 

George D. Girton (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 (Essentials) (Paperback)

Flex 2 with Actionscript 3.0 by Charles E. Brown

This book, written to a relatively low level, and with an intent to be comprehensive, is relentlessly procedural. The first hundred pages or so take you through installing Flex Builder and then step by step through some really simple mxXML based projects. There are truly some weird little "gotchas" that I doubt I would have noticed any other way but reading this book. In short, reading this book I know will save me countless hours of time, simply for revealing some drudge details that could have really messed me up, like the different kinds of quotation marks used when passing an argument to an Actionscript function from within an MX-based object. Plus I know what Flex is, and what it is not.

You can expect to know about layout containers, too. Consider the following:

"As you can see, there are 16 layout containers. Throughout this book we will cover nearly all of them. However, for now you'll just be concerned with the seven most commonly used ones, described in the following list: Hbox, Vbox, Canvas, Panel, Tile, ApplicationControlBar, and ControlBar" (This is not an exact quote; Brown gives the distinguishing characteristics for each, and follows with a procedural exploration of how to use them, complete with screen shots).

The author has a flex website, charlesebrown dot net . Check it out!

If you don't know anything about Flex and AS3 and you want to know it all, this isn't a bad place to start. If you like working step by step along with software, its perfect.You surely won't begrudge the author his diligent and thorough approach and basically good attitude even though the book is not too exciting. If you already know Flex, or Actionscript, this book will probably be too basic for you.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good basics book for Flex and ActionScript beginners, March 15, 2007

By 

Bernard Farrell (North of Boston, MA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 (Essentials) (Paperback)

First of all this book is an easy read. Mr. Brown does a good job of taking small steps and explaining everything clearly as he goes. At each stage, he does a good job of building on what he's already covered.

The book is clearly aimed at those with very little experience in Flex or ActionScript. If you've already been programming for a while with Flex (even an earlier version of Flex) I think you'll find the pace too slow.

I can recommend the book to those starting out with Flex or ActionScript.

For the rest of us, there are more advanced books that will fill out our Flex and Actionscript knowledge, such as a AdvancED ActionScript Components by Antonio De Donatis.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Flex demystified!, April 11, 2007

By 

Linda Weller "LA Flash" (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 (Essentials) (Paperback)

Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0
By Charles E. Brown
Publisher: Friends of Ed
Copyright 2007
IBSN:-13 (pbk) 978-1-59059-733-0

Reviewer: Linda Weller


The author explains Flex in a very interesting instructive way. It explains the meaning of Flex and ActionScript 3.0 in the new Flash landscape.

One of the great things about this book is that the author looks at all aspects of Flex from high/low levels and from a designer/developer perspective. It was great to discover if you can use XML or Dreamweaver you can use Flex. Flex will bring the web to a new level. Flex was introduced in 2004 as a solution to having to learn about Flash's scenes and timelines. Flex is a more traditional programming environment. It combines .mxml and ActionScript 3.0. The author urges everyone to "stop thinking page to page website and think smooth flowing desktop applications. Flex Builder 2 is built around Eclipse. The GUI uses XHTML and OOP. You use ActionScript 3.0 to extend the power of .mxml. When you add ActionScript 3.0 to Flex you can add dynamic interaction between your components. When you compile an application to a .swf it transforms the .mxml code to ActionScript 3.0 The goal of Flex is rapid development. You use ActionScript to connect the components together and .mxml to tell Flex how to assemble pre-build containers.

When beginning to do work in Flex he suggests that you start in design view and then move to code view to fine tune things. One of the benefits of using Flex over HTML is that it has adjustability to many sizes. You could take the same application you used on the web and scale it down for mobile for example. The downside of .mxml is that it can't loop or make decisions so you need ActionScript 3.0 for this. In AS 3.0 we now have Sprite which is essentially a Movie Clip without a timeline. Charles Brown explains that between the CDATA tags is where your ActionScript code is placed.

To create a new .mxml document you must first create a new Flex project. The main purpose of Flex is to present data and therefore it is called a presentation server. Flex applications are build by creating containers within containers the application tags being the outermost containers.

He covers the Navigation Containers: View Stack, Accordian and Tab Navigator. These are the ingredients that give Flex its rapid development reputation. New class files for the easy access of XML have been implemented called E4X. The section about displaying data with a data grid presents another rapid development feature. He discusses states which give you the timeline functionality without the timeline. He makes the distinction that Flex is not an animation program so, it will not be replacing Flash. He wraps up the last part of the book by launching into a two part case study of building a shopping cart utilizing all the concepts he has introduced earlier in the book.