Flex 3 Cookbook: Code-Recipes, Tips, and Tricks for RIA Developers (Adobe Developer Library) [Paperback]

Joshua Noble (Author), Todd Anderson (Author)

Book Description

Series: Adobe Developer Library | Publication Date: May 20, 2008

The best way to showcase a powerful new technology is to demonstrate its real-world results, and that's exactly what this new Cookbook does with Adobe Flex 3.

Wide ranging and highly practical, Flex 3 Cookbook contains more than 300 proven recipes for developing interactive Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 sites. You'll find everything from Flex basics, to solutions for working with visual components and data access, to tips on application development, unit testing, and using Adobe AIR.

You also get ideas from the development community. Through its Flex Cookbook website (www.adobe.com/devnet/), Adobe invited Flex developers to post their own solutions for working with this technology, and from hundreds of posts, the authors chose the best and most useful solutions to supplement Flex 3 Cookbook.

Each recipe inside provides a solution to a common problem, explains how and why it works, and offers sample code that you can put to use immediately. Topics include:

• Containers and dialogues
• Working with Text
• Data driven components
• DataGrid and Advanced DataGrid
• ItemRenderers and Editors
• Images, bitmaps, videos, and sounds
• CSS, styling, and skinning
• States and effects
• Working with Collections, arrays, and DataProviders
• Using DataBinding
• Validation, formatting, and regular expressions
• Using Charts and data visualization
• Services and Data Access
• Using RSLs and Modules
• Working with Adobe AIR

Whether you're a committed Flex developer or still evaluating the technology, you'll discover how to get quick results with Flex 3 using the recipes in this Cookbook. It's an ideal way to jumpstart your next web application.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Joshua Noble is a development consultant with three years of experience in building enterprise level applications using Flex integrated with Java, Ruby, ColdFusion, and Microsoft .NET.

Todd Anderson is a Senior Software Developer in the Multimedia Platforms Group at Schematic Boston, and is co-author of Adobe AIR Instant Results: Create - Modify - Reuse, a Wrox/Wiley title scheduled for release in spring of 2008.

Product Details

• Paperback: 704 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media; 1st Ed. edition (May 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596529856
• ISBN-13: 978-0596529857
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.1 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #806,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good. Could use some polish., May 30, 2008

By 

J. Dusbabek (USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flex 3 Cookbook: Code-Recipes, Tips, and Tricks for RIA Developers (Adobe Developer Library) (Paperback)

I got off to a rocky start with the Flex 3 Cookbook. Many of the recipes would be well suited for someone who is just beginning to develop in Flex. If you're a beginner, that's a good thing; if you're a more advanced user (one who has progressed beyond using states and doing your layouts in the designer) it might be a bit of a turn off.

Fortunately there are enough advanced recipes scattered throughout the book (in greater and greater density as you move to later chapters) to keep your interest. Chapters 17, 18 and 19 were my favorites (Browser Communication; Modules and RSL; and AIR, respectively).

My only real criticism of the book is that it bears many of the signs of being rushed to market (i.e. typos, unpolished code). I expect that on a blog, but find it detracting in a book.

There are a handful of recipes I'm surprised made it past the editors, '4.3 Create a Suggestive TextInput' being the worst. Not only is the output terrible, but there's a variable in the code that was undoubtedly part of a previous draft of the recipe, but is not used in the recipe printed in the book. Any developer can appreciate the need to get to market quickly, unfortunately it's not as easy to change a printed volume as it is to change source code.

I would have been happier, and probably given the book 5 stars, if the title had been pushed back another month and greater attention paid to details like these. Overall, I got enough information from the book to make it worth every star I gave it and every dollar I paid for it.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars You've Got Questions, Here are the Answers, July 9, 2008

By 

Scott McAllister - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flex 3 Cookbook: Code-Recipes, Tips, and Tricks for RIA Developers (Adobe Developer Library) (Paperback)

In my progression as a budding Flex developer I have reached the point where I'm passed the "getting started" tutorials but still not a master of anything with the language. My questions have from general concepts to the much more specific. This book is perfectly tailored to provide the answers I needed.

The format of the publication is set up nicely as it states a problem and then explains a solution. The way I usually judge a book's worth is to attack it with a specific question in mind, and then see how well it helps me solve the problem. The Flex 3 Cookbook passed with flying colors.

I needed some help wrapping my mind around manipulating data in an ArrayCollection. Section 13.1 called 'Add, Sort, and Retrieve Data from an ArrayCollection' guided me to a much better understanding of ArrayCollections. My question was answered, although there was a typo in the example code, hence the 4-star rating rather than 5.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Resource, June 14, 2008

By 

Garth D. Braithwaite (Las Vegas, NV) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Flex 3 Cookbook: Code-Recipes, Tips, and Tricks for RIA Developers (Adobe Developer Library) (Paperback)

The Flex 3 Cookbook is an amazing resource, and it should be found in the library of any Flex developer. Its solution based training provides motivation for completing projects while filling in potential gaps of knowledge. Not the definitive book, but an excellent resource.