2007 / August 18^th/ Flex 2: Training from the source

A while ago I set myself on a personal mission to learn Flex. I know myself around HTML, CSS, and Javascript like a pro — but to be honest I’ve never been a fan of overly “strict” programming environments like Flex. Actionscript 3 is a strongly-typed language, and the the rest of Flex is all XML files. It was a hard transition to me (being a huge fan of loosely typed languages like Ruby). As a result, I was having an increasingly difficult time picking up Flex — so I opted to pick up a book. I went with Flex 2: Training from the Source. Overall, I’ve been very happy with the book.

Overview

The structure of this book revolves around building a Flex application called FlexGrocer. It has three main portions to the application — a front-end Ecommerce app, a back-end for entering products, and a dashboard for viewing statistics about the application. I really enjoyed the approach as it covers the versatility of the Flex framework — and doesn’t pigeonhole you into learning front-ends or back-ends.

The book also comes with a CD that gives you all the assets you’ll need — images and such. The XML (data) for the application are stored on a live domain: www.flexgrocer.com. Along with the assets, there are source files for each step of the way so you’re free to skip ahead a few chapters.

Things I like

I think the main selling point for this book to me is the hands-on approach. Instead of just learning concepts about the framework, it teaches you the concepts while building an actual application. Additionally, you end up writing 98% of the actual code used in the application — so you’re never in the dark about how something is working.

The second point that I really like is that it doesn’t require much previous experience. I had never coded in ActionScript, and I was perfectly at home following the code in the examples. A knowledge of object-oriented languages and perhaps the concept of strong-typing is definitely a prerequisite — but beyond that, you won’t need to know much more.

Things I don’t like

The biggest downside to me is where they brought in data services into the app. Right now, the data services require ColdFusion server, and I’m not sure I’m willing to set up yet another server on my laptop. Unfortunately, things like animations and charting lie beyond this chapter — and are thus a requirement. I would have much rather seen Data Services as an addendum to the book in an additional chapter. I realize that data services are a huge selling point for Flex — but I think the web is increasingly working toward a loosely coupled architecture: one where the front-end of a site is not reliant on the back end technology.

Another thing is that I believe some of the chapters were a bit long-winded and could have been trimmed down. Some of the long-winded sections seemed to try and drive some point home — like loosely coupling your components, but ended up diluting the importance because there were simply too many words.

Conclusion

All in all, I think this is a great beginners book for those looking to start up with Flex. It not only teaches you the basics, but teaches you the right way to code in Flex. Actionscript 3 is an extremely powerful and flexible language: but it gets easy to write sloppy, tightly-coupled, hard to maintain code. This book puts a lot of effort in teaching you how to build a component like Adobe would. This is really important and where I think most books fail.

This book is also one of the few books I think are worth their cover price. I felt like I needed to read the whole book — and not glance over chapters on a whim. It also takes quite a while to actually go through the book — maybe 40-50 hours if you do it right. For a book that’s only $35, that’s totally worth the price.

1. 

   Mike Papageorge

   August 19^th | #

   Great info Kyle. I’m hoping to dive more into flex myself, but have yet to have the time. It would be nice to plug it into our framework and see how clients like it for admin purposes. I believe there are some people doing this with Rails quite successfully…

2. 

   Geof Harries

   August 21^st | #

   Did you buy a copy of Flex Builder or are you using the free SDK?

3. 

   Kyle

   August 26^th | #

   Geoff: I picked up an education version for my own personal use a while ago, but I also have a commercial copy @ work.

4. 

   Giatas

   September 19^th | #

   Interesting…

5. 

   Nico

   September 22^nd | #

   Sorry :(

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