The book is structured to gradually exposure the reader to Flex programming. Since I was pretty new to using Flex, I found it rewarding to just read straight through chapter-by-chapter. The book is written such that it doesn’t assume that the reader has had any exposure to Flash-based programming. If you have had any experience with other object-oriented programming languages then you should feel right at home programming with Flex 2. I did find it useful to have some familiarity with web technologies like HTML, XML, and Javascript.
The authors don’t waste a lot of time getting right to the interesting parts of Flex: there are the obligatory pages about the history of Flex, and a section of how to go about downloading and setting up the development environment, but by these are short and concise. I also find it refreshing that the book doesn’t assume that you will be using FlexBuilder (Adobe’s for-pay Eclipse-based development environment), and they give equal treatment to those who are developing Flex applications using the free Flex 2 SDK.
The book had a basic introduction to ActionScript, which is the scripting language that Flex uses, but by the time I had read about half-way through the book, the Actionscript code samples were starting to get pretty involved. Fortunately the descriptions of what the code was doing were clear and the program flow was pretty easy to follow. Learning Actionscript is a topic that could fill its own book, so the authors had a deliberately narrow focus on exposing enough Actionscript to make it possible to learn Flex. Once you are done with this book, you will probably want to pick up a good book on ActionScript to expand your understanding.
The book also has a very well-written chapter on accessing remote data services using HTTP and Web Services. This is where having some experience with setting up Web Servers and doing some server-side programming really came in handy. Compared to the other chapters of the book which felt more or less like a tutorial, this chapter seemed to come the closest to presenting the true power behind using Flex as a Rich Internet Application framework. Sadly, the chapter was rather short and I found myself wishing that there was more on this topic.
One small complaint I have about the book was that it didn’t appear that any of the example code was available on-line. The book lists a URL that claims to have example code, but that only gives an error when you type it in the browser. When you do manage to find the page by searching on the O`Reilly website, there doesn’t appear to be any download links for the book. Not that this was a huge problem: even though XML tends to be very verbose, I was happy to see that for the most part the authors were able to keep their example code snippets relatively small and it was pretty trivial to type them in myself. It might just be that Flex is so expressive or that there is really good library support, but I didn’t feel too inconvenienced by not having access to the source code.
Overall I was pleased with this book. It is difficult to cover a topic like Flex, MXML and Actionscript in a scant 450 or so pages, but the author’s definitely seem to have covered the basics. After reading the book I found myself wanting to do more with Flex 2 and wanting to learn more about Actionscript.
If you are newcomer to the world of Flash programming and want to see what the future of the Flash platform is, then I heartily recommend this book. If you are already savvy with Actionscript (the version that Flex 2 supports is 3.0) then you may still find some value in this book due to its’ coverage of MXML and theFlexBuilder toolset.
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