Flex 3 Bible at Dominant Systems Book Store

Flex your development muscles with this hefty guide

Write programs using familiar workflows, deliver rich applications for Web or desktop, and integrate with a variety of application servers using ColdFusion, PHP, and others-all with the new Flex Builder 3 toolkit and the comprehensive tutorials in this packed reference. You'll learn the basics of Flex 3, then quickly start using MXML, ActionScript, CSS, and other tools to create applications that can run on any browser or operating system.

Install and learn how to use Flex Builder 3
Explore MXML, ActionScript 3, and the anatomy of a Flex application
Lay out Flex controls and containers, and use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to create look and feel
Incorporate Advanced List controls, Flex charting components, and data entry forms
Integrate your Flex applications with a variety of application servers
Create cross-operating system desktop applications with Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)

Companion Web Site
Visit www.wiley.com/go/flex3 to access code files for the projects in the book.

Customer Reviews & Comments
This 900+ page book is a seriously meticulous walk-through of all the essential aspects of developing Flex applications as of the Flex 3 release. After a tiny bit of history, the author wastes no time in getting right to the Eclipse IDE in it's Flex 3 incarnation. One indication of the thoroughness of this book is in the fact that he spends 7 pages entirely devoted to the "html-template" folder within a Flex project! And I don't know how many other Flex books out there (as I write this in 2008): * Show you how to override the clone() function for event bubbling * Describe the use of Flex 3 advanced layout constraints like constraintRows and constraintColumns * Spend 6 pages showing you how to create skinning graphics in Flash CS3 * Describe the all-important facts surrounding switchable-container creation policy and deferred instantiation * Show you how to use the BindableComboBox that comes with the ColdFusion Extensions for Flex Builder * Walk you through how to group flat data with the GroupingCollection and the Advanced DataGrid * Show you how to install and configure a Flex-BlazeDS-Java application * Show you how to configure and develop a Flex-Coldfusion application * Show you how to create a Flex-ASP.NET application * Show you how to create a Flex-PHP application It is a testament to the depth of the Flex API and to the inherent complexity of ANY serious front-end development platform that I can say that even with this book, there are still some pretty important things that are not covered. There's no coverage of the History Manager or deep linking, no coverage of the ExternalInterface API, no coverage of how to use Cairngorm or other frameworks to keep a large application from becoming a tangled mess. But the book is already pretty darn thick, and it had to end somewhere. Basically, I think that with this book plus a good book devoted to ActionScript 3, the motivated novice-to-intermediate Flex developer would be good to go. Excellent book.

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