Customer Reviews

Hello! Flex 4

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

 

 

If you've been thinking about Flex, or know someone who wants to get a basic understanding in a very short amount of time you'll want to check out Hello Flex 4 by Peter Armstrong.

This short 234 paged book is an action packed light hearted casual read for programmers who are curious about Flex but may not be at the point where they want to invest a ton of time until they get a general understanding of how it works and if it's a right match for them.

The tone of the book is laid back, and Peter doesn't bore you with exhaustive detail, while at the same time there are small cartoons to keep it fun. Structure wise the approach uses sessions/labs to demonstrate concepts, and these sessions provide real working code. As each session progresses it builds upon the last - leading up to a full blown application.

So the examples are small and easy to understand, while at the same time being practical that you could then apply for you own purposes. In the very last chapter he's a bit gutsy by incorporating the Cairngorm MVC framework as part of the lab... Cairngorm is a pretty heavy duty topic, so my reaction was would using it in a introductory book be good idea?

Well, if you really wanted to get an honest quick feel if Flex is right for you, you might as well get a taste of what a framework driven Flex application would look like. To my surprise though, Peter pulls it off, and makes Cairngorm digestible (especially considering the reader may not have any prior Flex/ActionScript exposure) by keeping it simple, to the point, and clear about what it's role is in a Flex application.

So overall, for a quick read and low price, this is a great way to jumpstart your Flex skills. There's currently a promotion where you can get the book for a measly $10 by using discount code hf410 (I think it ends at the end of the month).

I wish this book had been available when I started developing in Flex. A mashup app for the books project is a great choice. Pleasantly surprised to see that low-level flash sprite programming (for Yahoo map markers) was included. I had struggled with that and good resources are hard to find. Discussion of Cairngorm is good. Discussion of RIA in general is good. Very complete coverage of the topics, delivered succinctly with lots of code - I like that.

This book was a strange mix of a surface level coverage of some Flex 4 topics together with a complex final example involving Cairngorm that took up 20% of the book. I was hoping this would be a good introduction to at least what's new or different in Flex 4, but I came away disappointed. I should point out that the book does mention some of the key differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4, but most of what this book presents can be had in online tutorials and blogs.

The Manning "Hello" series purports to be a way to "learn a new technology without getting bogged down in too many details", but to me it seems more like a way to get a brief taste for a technology without learning much about it. In any case, for most technologies, if you don't want to see the details, you really won't be able to do much with the technology.

If you can get the eBook version of this book on promotion for $10 like I did it is worth reading, but beyond that I simply can't recommend it.

This book is good for entry level flex developers to get general idea.I would recommend Flex 4 cook book which helps to solve everyday problems using flex.

Book is very well written. Covers quite a bit of ground & is yet refreshingly succinct!

It does assume however (& thankfully so!) that you know programming and are just trying to learn Flex. So definitely not one of those intro to programming through Flex books. As an experienced Java programmer with some Flex 3 experience, I found this book extremely useful & finished the book in a weekend.

Author uses the last chapter to create an example using the Cairngorm framework. Crairngorm in my opinion is bloated and unnecessarily complicated. The "Mate Framework" is much simpler. Anyone getting into Flex should definitely take a look at it.

I'm only a few chapters in so far, but this book appears to be the one I have been looking for. I am one of those Flash aficionados who is comfortable with the cartoonist desk metaphor, and who had developed some small level of expertise with AS2 (that I mostly learned from Lynda Weinman). Like many Flash designers, I am overwhelmed by AS3 and MXML and OOP. So how to climb that steep learning curve? O'Reilly books? Colin Moock? (No offense to the brilliant Colin Moock.) Get a masters in computer science and spend a few years studying MVP and Cairngorm? The chasm between the worlds of the creative AS2 designer, and the AS3 programmer with their own IDE - well it seemed insurmountable. It is welcome then that a book such as Mr. Armstrong's should finally come along. A guy who talks like a guy (with strong opinions), and straightforward explanations. Whew. What a relief. I fell instantly in like with this book with his candid and honest revelation that 2008 brought some significant professional failings. That took guts. And it won me over from page "xiii."

In the preface of the book, the author talked about how he failed to write 3 books before the incarnation of this great book. This book is not great. I've seen much better technical writings than this. The author writes like he's a 17 year old, the first example does not even compile. Some examples will require minor tweaking before the project will compile, if you are a veteran programmer, you probably can debug the example, but if you are a beginner programming, stay away from this book, you'll pull your hair out. I will not recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn Flex 4.

I don't know about you, but I tend to have very little respect for a book that purports to teach you something when the very first example contains an error. The simplest example in the book won't compile if you type it in as specified on page 6, Hello.mxml!! This means that both the author and the editor either don't know what they are talking about, or worse, don't care enough about the reader to ensure the material is correct. In either case, the publication is not worth buying!! The only reason I'm giving this 1 star is that I haven't yet gone beyond the first example, so if the book is able to recover from this initial debacle, I'll revise this review....as it stands now though...DO NOT BUY THIS PIECE OF JUNK!! Oh, and by the way to get the first example to compile simply change the <s:Label> tag to this:

<s:Label text="Hello! Flex 4" fontSize="128"/>

Now was that SO DIFFICULT??