The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0: Friends of Ed Adobe Learning Library

by Charles E. Brown

ActionScript 3, Flex, and Flexbuilder 2 are the hot new technologies from Adobe that allow Flash developers to build more powerful Flash applications than ever before. This book is a comprehensive tutorial and reference guide that teaches readers everything they need to know about these new technologies, from the very beginning, right through advanced topics. Readers will need some general web development experience, and ideally have Flash and...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590597338
• ISBN13: 9781590597330
• Release Date: March 2007
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 520 Pages
• Weight: 1.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 7.7" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Best Flex ever...

concise and to the point. great read even if you've done other languages like ASP or Coldfusion. Definitely a keeper.

This book rocks!

I purchased this book to learn about Flex 2 and ActionScript 3.0. I am an experienced programmer, though only a part-time one at work, but am new to both Flex and ActionScript. I really like Mr. Brown's approach throughout the book. Concepts are presented well and usually thoroughly. But, he always takes a step to the side to explain things a little further or tie the concept to other parts of the programming world. The approach is nice. It makes the book feel as though Mr. Brown is your friend or coworker, sitting with you to help you learn and explaining things in several different ways so that you can "get it." Parts are technical enough, while others can be very down to earth. The only problem I had is that some topics are not addressed to a more advanced level. For example, the chapter on states covers the basics, but only with Flex (both source and design methods though). The ActionScript way of doing states is not even discussed. Now granted, Mr. Brown did say in his introduction that the book is a broad view of things, so this omission is not a big deal and can be expected since no one book can cover everything. It just requires a different source if you desire to use ActionScript to handle states, which is needed for handling states from runtime user input (something I am very interested in). To me, states are huge in Flex and I would have liked it if Mr. Brown had discussed more about it. However, my rating remains at 5 stars since this is not enough to lower it at all. Mr. Brown did accomplish what he said he would do in his introduction and the book is an excellent resource for learning and understanding Flex 2, ActionScript 3.0, and how they tie into other things like XML, ColdFusion, etc. Also, the case study Mr. Brown has is a fully functional project that ties a lot of things together and includes a lot of both Flex 2 design and ActionScript 3.0 code. Mr. Brown leads you through the design of the case study in a way that makes learning and understanding the concepts easier. I would recommend this book to anyone that wants to learn Flex 2. It was well worth it and it continues to help me develop in Flex 2.

Get Up to Speed With Flex 2 Fast

This is an excellent book that doesn't waste time and gets you up to speed in Flex 2 quickly. The author explains clearly how, what, and why you are doing each of the individual steps as you progress through the hands on tutorials. True, it is an easy read but you learn a lot by the time you are done. It is a great starting point and makes Flex 2 really fun. From here I'll go on to harder stuff. Initially, I did find some problems with the download code, as an earlier reviewer commented, but the author has fixed all that. All in all, this is a job well done.

Flex demystified!

Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 By Charles E. Brown Publisher: Friends of Ed Copyright 2007 IBSN:-13 (pbk) 978-1-59059-733-0 Reviewer: Linda Weller The author explains Flex in a very interesting instructive way. It explains the meaning of Flex and ActionScript 3.0 in the new Flash landscape. One of the great things about this book is that the author looks at all aspects of Flex from high/low levels and from a designer/developer perspective. It was great to discover if you can use XML or Dreamweaver you can use Flex. Flex will bring the web to a new level. Flex was introduced in 2004 as a solution to having to learn about Flash's scenes and timelines. Flex is a more traditional programming environment. It combines .mxml and ActionScript 3.0. The author urges everyone to "stop thinking page to page website and think smooth flowing desktop applications. Flex Builder 2 is built around Eclipse. The GUI uses XHTML and OOP. You use ActionScript 3.0 to extend the power of .mxml. When you add ActionScript 3.0 to Flex you can add dynamic interaction between your components. When you compile an application to a .swf it transforms the .mxml code to ActionScript 3.0 The goal of Flex is rapid development. You use ActionScript to connect the components together and .mxml to tell Flex how to assemble pre-build containers. When beginning to do work in Flex he suggests that you start in design view and then move to code view to fine tune things. One of the benefits of using Flex over HTML is that it has adjustability to many sizes. You could take the same application you used on the web and scale it down for mobile for example. The downside of .mxml is that it can't loop or make decisions so you need ActionScript 3.0 for this. In AS 3.0 we now have Sprite which is essentially a Movie Clip without a timeline. Charles Brown explains that between the CDATA tags is where your ActionScript code is placed. To create a new .mxml document you must first create a new Flex project. The main purpose of Flex is to present data and therefore it is called a presentation server. Flex applications are build by creating containers within containers the application tags being the outermost containers. He covers the Navigation Containers: View Stack, Accordian and Tab Navigator. These are the ingredients that give Flex its rapid development reputation. New class files for the easy access of XML have been implemented called E4X. The section about displaying data with a data grid presents another rapid development feature. He discusses states which give you the timeline functionality without the timeline. He makes the distinction that Flex is not an animation program so, it will not be replacing Flash. He wraps up the last part of the book by launching into a two part case study of building a shopping cart utilizing all the concepts he has introduced earlier in the book.

Excellent

I've worked on several enterprise level applications (10,000+ users) and this book has helped me work through some of the initial problems I was having. If you're looking for a good book on how to integrate Flex 2 and Actionscript 3.0, you'll like this book.