Flex 3 in Action review by Ray Camden
When you mention the name Ray Camden, those in the ColdFusion community will immediately recognize the name. Ray is an active participant with a huge following on his blog, and has been incredibly successful with his various initiatves such as BlogCFC, and RIAForge. Even his experiments such as coldfusionBloggers earns an impressive degree of traction.
Ray recently read an early draft of the book (meaning it hadn’t gone through any proof reading or editorial swags yet) and posted a thorough review on his blog.
The number one thing that struck me about this book is how well it presents the basic concepts. The book will often make comparisons to “traditional” web development (html/js) and how it compares to Flex. This makes things a lot easier to grok for those of us moving from the HTML development to RIA work. Those of you who use ColdFusion (a few of my readers, right?) will also be happy to see many comparisons between Flex and ColdFusion concepts. All in all this makes for a very friendly book.
Flex in Action Sample chapter inspires DayG
Java Developer DayG had heard the buzz surrounding Flex and RIAs, but had the perception that it was expensive to get into. Coming from his Java background he wanted to know how Flex solves certain UI challenges and contrast that against how he would do it in Java using the technologies that he’s familiar with (JSF, jQuery, Scriptaculous).
He made a move to get in on the Flex 3 In Action early access program where you get access to the book as it’s being written; it starts off with lots of rough drafts, but allows you to bypass the waiting process and get the content as it becomes available.
After reading chapter 1, DayG writes “now why didn’t I try Flex earlier… the argment there abotu the lack of user interactivity from pure HTML pages made a lot of sense…”
DayG has been contributing a lot of thoughts, questions and feedback in the books forums - and we’ve been incorporating as much of the feedback as possible… one of the goals of the book is to give back to the community, as it’s for them.
You can read about his adventures in Flex at his blog.
About
Flex In Action (FiA) is a book for coders who come from traditional web technologies, and progressively takes them on a journey of understanding. Flex can easily be frustrating to newcomers who are used to the ease of their current language, so FiA takes an approach of leveraging your existing skills by using examples that you can relate to in your current tech vs how it’s done in Flex. It gradually introduces topics on an as needed basis so that you only need to worry about learning one thing at a time. Plus various ways of doing the same thing are explained in depth so that you understand your options… and lastly, FiA makes learning Flex fun!
