Customer Reviews

Professional Adobe Flex 2 (Programmer to Programmer)

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

 

 

I just spent 3hr. at Barnes and Noble reading this book.

This book has what is lacking in O'Reilly's Programming Flex 2.
There is much more info on Flex 2.0.1. It give you a competent example on creating a YouTube viewer w/ Cairngorm. That is something I've wanted to know but most blog post are convoluted about the subject. The examples on flex-ajax bridge are nice and give also a practical app.

Their is detailed info on component life cycle, building modular app, component extension and dynamic app build. No to mention great ways to use the command line and/or Flex Builder. It allows you to have vision not just direction. You see the examples and think, "That gives me an idea".

OH, LOTS OF ACTIONSCRIPT USE!!!! for all of you low-level lovers.

RESULT
This books is a all around good book. It balances reference and examples well. It has pictures to see what you are making. The flow is just right not to fast not to slow. They didn't glaze over on any subject that was written. Everything is detailed

Buy it and if you need anything else just go to the flex documentation

I was glad to hear of this book being published since, until recently, there were so few Flex 2 books available. However, I am deeply disappointed in it. While the content covered is comprehensive, it has a zillion errors in it including referencing functions, classes or variables by a wrong name, as well as typographical mistakes. Also, the writing style is not of the quality I would expect in a book self-titled "Professional". I would not recommend this book at all until it's been massively re-edited.

As part of my community involvement (www.cflex.net and www.dopejam.com), one of my goals is to have read every Flex book there is so that I can advise people when they're looking for a book which book is right for them. The amount of Flex 2 books out there is awesome, and we're definitely far away from being able to say there's "too many options". Currently I've read The Essential Guide to Flex 2 w/AS3, and am reading RIAs w/Adobe Flex and Java, and Programming Flex 2 - The Comprehensive Guide.

All of the books I've read so far have been great, and having 8 yrs of experience in the Knowledge Management industry, if the content is relevant and accurate, it's valuable. Each of the books have different approaches, breadth, and depth of subject matter. So I wouldn't say one book is better than another - more important is to find the book that best matches how you learn, where you're at learning curve wise, and how committed you are (do you want to just know enough to make some cool CRUDs, or become an extreme RIA ninja).

One of the things I've found with Flex is it's very difficult to talk purely about one subject without having to reference surrounding topics to make examples have some kind of context. E.g. it's hard to talk about Effects without mentioning Events. Do you cover all of ActionScript up front, or try to integrate AS understanding as you go along piggy backing on other subjects?

So there's two ways to tackle this - introduce a lot of things at once, and as the book goes along you progressively increase on depth; or topic by topic you lay it all down, so that once that topic is covered you can utilize that info in subsequent topics if you need to.

Both are valid approaches, and all I would say is consider what kind of learner you are. Do you like knowing a little about a lot upfront to get a big picture, or do you find that too overwhelming and just want very focused topics and know all that there is to know about that topic.

At the same time, if you wanted a lot of width and breadth, you'd end up with a 3000 page book. So look at the chapter listing of all the books you're considering and see how many topics they cover, if it's A LOT of subjects and roughly the same amount of pages of another book, you're going to get more breadth and depth. And vice versa, fewer topics over the same amount of pages is usually indicative of depth.

Recently I finished Professional Adobe Flex 2, by Rich Tretola, Simon Barber, and Renaun Erickson. I've actually had the pleasure of knowing both Rich and Renaun for awhile and met them in person at Adobe MAX 06, and hope to meet Simon at some point. I know from first hand knowledge that these guys are extremely knowledgeable at Flex, and what I would classify as extreme experts.

Though that doesn't necessarily translate into the ability to write well - but fortunately they have the skill, and you can see from their blogs that they're passionate about teaching and sharing knowledge.

This is a good sized book weighing in at 687 pages - and the approach they take is cover a lot of things at once, and progressively ramp up in complexity. The content leans towards the breadth side of things, but they quickly jump straight into deep territory in the sense that they reveal the low level details of how Flex works. With that being said, although a useful book to have as a beginner, they don't spend too much time on "newbie" stuff, and focus more on real world issues you'll encounter. One highlight of the book is the examples; they're very practical and universal, and you get some useful nuggets of code you can use in your real world applications.

I'd recommend this book to anyone, but those that will get the most out of it are intermediate level users who've conquered the rudimentary basics Flex and want to take their game further, and need that next level of understanding. It's also a decent reference book if you want to quickly brush up on a certain topic, or if you're struggling with and issue and need further understanding on the subject to conquer it.

I've always been a big fan of the Wrox series, but I was rather disappointed with this book:

* I found the learning curve was too erratic. I have a background in Actionscript so I wasn't phased when they showed lots of code in the early chapters, but it would certainly scare others away. At other times it went into tedious detail about something that was really obvious...

* The tone of the book is dry and dull. I'm normally someone who reads books from cover to cover, but I'll admit I started skimming through a lot of the material.

* The book covers a lot of topics, but in relatively little depth.

* Commits the cardinal sin of having non-compilable code.

* The chapter on Flex Data Services was just criminal - it only talked about *configuring* the server, not actually *using it*!

* At no point do you ever BUILD A PROPER FLEX DATA-DRIVEN APPLICATION!!!

Having said all that, the book does make quite a good reference book as it touches on virtually ever part of the Flex ecosystem.

This book hasn't been edited at all.
No structure at all. Full of errors.
It seems like the authors forgot to agree on who is gonna cover what.
The third chapter is just rephrasing of the previous chapter.
There is some useful information hidden in the book but it's really a pain to read.
I suspect the authors are designers that have by accident started programming.
And worse: they wrote a book.

I thought this book would teach you how to code but in the end almost all of it is just code snippets that you really can't test since they are not functional by themselves. i also noticed that some of the examples are copied word for word from the Adobe Guide book which is available for free on the adobe website. Overall i was disappointed with this book as it didn't teach me how to do anything.

Well I have to admit so far I've never been really happy with any book from 'Wrox'. This one does have some good examples, and it has been one of the better books I've had from Wrox. However, I like my Programming Flex 2 from Oreilly better. If you already have a couple books on Flex and are just looking for a bit more information, this one does have some pretty advanced examples in it - and is worth buying (but personally I'd try to save a couple bucks and buy it used).

I have not read this book yet, merely flicked through the table of contents and glanced at any interesting areas. (An 8" high stack of Flex books arrived en-masse just in time for my vacation - thanks Amazon!) One item caught my eye but I could not initially get it to work so I posted a question on the WROX forum for this book. I received a reply and very good help within a couple of hours! - and that is why I am awarding five stars * * * * * - well done chaps, service speaks volumes.
To find out more I recommend checking out the forum - worth it for the Reflection class (cf. page 616).
Highly recommended.