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

by Joshua Noble, Todd Anderson

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Average Rating:4.5 out of 5 stars
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Editorial Reviews
Product Description
The best way to show off a powerful new technology is to demonstrate real-world results with it, and that's exactly what Adobe and O'Reilly have done with Flex 3. Through it's Flex Cookbook website, Adobe invited users of the Flex 3 beta to post their own solutions for working with this technology, using O'Reilly's popular problem-solution-discussion format. Website monitors (and authors) Joshua Noble and Todd Anderson chose the most useful solutions for Flex 3 Cookbook. This highly practical book contains more than 200 proven recipes for developing interactive Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 sites, including several contributed by Noble, Anderson, and other Flex experts. You'll find everything from Flex basics and working with menus and controls, to methods for compiling, deploying, and configuring Flex applications. Each recipe features a discussion of how and why it works, and many of them offer sample code that you can put to use immediately. Topics include: Menus and controls Containers and dialogues Working with Text List, tiles, trees, and repeaters DataGrid and Advanced DataGrid Renderers Images, videos, and sounds CSS and skinning Building components States and effects Collections, arrays, and DataProviders DataBinding Validation/formatters Charting and data visualization State management, SharedObjects and LocalConnection Working with services and ServerSide communication Working with XML Communicating with the browser Application development strategies Runtime and dynamic shared libraries 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 thesethese recipes. Now that Flex is an open source framework, the user community will continue to supply solutions to extend and improve the technology. This Cookbook offers you the cream of the crop.


All Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review:4.5 out of 5 stars
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 starsGodd book as cookbook, 2008-12-02
"Flex 3 Cookbook" provides recipes to over 300 most common dishes. It wasn't authors' intention to lead an introductory course to Flex and ActionScript and so, the book does not contain information on language constructs, syntax and principles.

Content is divided into clearly themed chapters, each of which contains related recipes. Each recipe is made up of 3 parts: Problem, Solution and Discussion. The first part serves as an introduction and description of the problem, Solution gives a concise walk-through and Discussion explains the decisions made in the Solution part. Each problem is well illustrated with adequate ActionScript and MXML code samples.

The book covers a broad range of topics, starting with a trivial "How do I react upon a button being clicked", the list is full of many useful solutions. In my opinion it is a good choice especially for beginners and intermediate Flex adepts. Thanks to the wide spectrum of topics, they will benefit the most. It can also serve as a reference used when an answer to a specific problem is sought - well made chapter division makes searching straightforward.

The book is written with clear and concise language.


0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:

5 out of 5 starsLevel your expectations, 2008-10-26
I haven't read all of this book, but from what I've seen, it is pretty good info. The format is good, listing a problem, a solution, and a discussion. I've read some good and not so great Flex books and I have noticed books with Todd Anderson as the author have been good(see Adobe Air, create modify reuse).

-I did not read Flex 2 Cookbook - the information looks new to me!
-There will be some errors in any book, especially programming books. With the Flex technology changing so fast, I would rather see a book rushed to market than months spent trying to cleanup every typo and minor compile errors(as other reviewers have said). We can figure out what typos and minor compile errors are supposed to be.

I have approx 6 flex books and this one is at the top of my list right now.


5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 starsYou've Got Questions, Here are the Answers, 2008-07-09
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.


2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3 out of 5 starsGood but not much new - No charting, 2008-07-03
I was hoping for more than just the trivial examples that you can get anywhere. There are a few, but not nearly enough. No charting examples at all. Its clear that this compilation of ideas was created ad hoc and not well thought out. Even so, it has saved me some time here and there.


2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4 out of 5 starsExcellent Resource, 2008-06-14
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.




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