Customer Reviews

Foundation Flex for Designers

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

 

 

First off, this book has received bad reviews for not being technical enough, but frankly that's not the scope of the book. If you're not familiar with Flex and looking to learn Flex Builder and the Flex API, this is not the correct book. It's sister from friends of Ed will serve you much better:
Foundation Flex for Developers: Data-Driven Applications with PHP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, and LCDS

As a hybrid designer/developer with 7 years experience developing complex applications in Flash, I've been making the switch to Flex. I found that once I had a grip on the basics of Flex, I was left with a conundrum. "OK it works, but how do I make it pretty?" Coming from Flash where it's really easy to just draw a graphic and be done with it, Flex will seam a bit stark. Flex for Designers came to the rescue in my hour of need. It clearly explains how to style the Flex components with CSS, and various ways of using graphics generated in Flash, Fireworks, Photoshop & Illustrator.

If you're a designer working with a Flex developer to generate graphic resources, this book will show you multiple ways to do so, so you can choose the best techniques for your work flow. It will not, however, teach you how to make working applications in Flex.

Most of the information in the book is available elsewhere but often buried within other concepts or spread all over the net. This book is an indispensable guide for making the Flex components look the way you want them to, from simple style changing to completely custom graphcis.

Chapter 2, make your first program, an RSS reader. The link he gives, to his own site and critical for the success of the example program, is dead.

The rest of the book is of equal quality.
Very poor book all around.

I was really excited about this title I have been wanting to learn Flex! As a Flash Interactive Designer I wanted to learn how to do what I can in Flash in Flex. I received the book I quickly scanned it , looked at the lessons it looks AWESOME! I am excited. I open the book follow the instructions I realize I need Flex 3 ...OK that's fine I go get the beta, removing the earlier version first I now have 90 days with Beta 3 ...cool...

I open the book begin the lesson and I am met with a errata error it seems that Adobe changed the Beta from the one used in the book ..the instructions tell me to right click and select the anchor point ...there are no anchor point or a context menu??

So I did what every designer would do, I think ? I went to the books web site lookng for Errata...NONE!, Looking for a contact NONE! Filled out the eratta form an submitted but I was anxious so I went to one of the authors blog Lord Alex and sent a email titled "Can't use the Book"! He replied with in hours! Wow! He said it appeared I was right Adobe had changed the Beta versions and he would work out a solution...well he was better than his word..he posted a animated screen capture on the steps to complete, and aided me in debugging..

I completed the lesson and on to lesson 2....I will keep you informed!

Just let me say thanks to Lord Alex his book is just what I need to get started and he has been great...FOE still has not posted an errata page yet though... FOE get on it ,please!

This is one of the worst IT books I've encountered. It is like an ordinary intro level book for Flex 3 but badly done and the more technical topics have been left out. Nothing especial for designers. Examples are ugly and not "designy" at all. Contains a lot of errors. Frustrating experience. Better tutorials can be Googled in seconds.

Keep your distance and seek better sources!

This is a pretty comprehensive introductory survey and I keep going back to it. The variety of practical examples--making a basic webpage with Flex, building a photo gallery, integrating with Flash animation, adding charts, video--are what make the book worthwhile.

I cannot give it five stars because of the endless errata (see other reviews, and notes at bottom), but the errata are of a sort that should not bother a mid-level designer or developer. Besides, the publisher (Apress/Friends of Ed) is really to blame, for rushing this book to press without review, and then failing to post errata and updated examples.

SOME NOTES ON ERRATA: In the first chapter alone, in which you create an XML Atom web-feed reader, there are at least six errors, some of them potentially fatal. Other reviewers have noted that the author's own URL, lordalex.org, which is offered as the example, is dead. That's very annoying, though I substituted a friend's Blogger feed ([...]), which did work. In the same chapter, the authors spend time illustrating how to use the anchor dots when putting in a component panel. But the anchor dots don't exist in the FlexBuilder 3 release of 2008. A screenshot illustration shows a method entered as "send.feed()" while the text tells you to type "feed.send()". It took me a while to figure out that the book's authors were basing their instructions and illustrations on an earlier beta.

I'm sorry, but this book is trash. The description states that the reader will learn how to customize a Flex app to look unlike the rest. It's clear that the author was either incapable or too lazy to create a Flex web site designed in Photoshop.

I give this book zero stars (though Amazon forced me to give at least one star).