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.

… read the full article

The last time I went to MAX was for the 2006 one in Las Vegas where I got to meet a plethora of cool folks including Mr House of Fusion Michael Dinowitz, Rich Tretola (community manager of  InsideRIA and author of a few books incl Beginning AIR), Renaun Erickson, 30 Seconds on AIR king Phillip Kerman (and author of Flash in 24hrs), and of course many folks from the Silicon Valley Flex User Group were there (Tom Ortega, Clint Modien, Ben Lucyk, Brendan Meutzner, etc…).

That’s just to name a few! I’ll be heading to Max 2008 and looking forward to meeting many more folks. If you see me swing by and say hi! I love hearing about how people are using Flex, the types of applications they’re building, and the types of Flex related knowledge that they wish were more readily available.

Cheers.

Tariq Ahmed

For those of you attending Flex Camp Toronto, you’ll get a chance to meet one of the contributors to the Flex 3 In Action book - Faisal Abid. If you’re heading out there drop him a hello!

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.

Flex 3 In Action is now available on MEAP.

What’s a MEAP?!

It’s the Manning Early Access Program which allows people to access books that are in the process of being developed, which is a cool program in that it allows you to see how a book evolves from rough drafts all the way to the final polished product.

Get the content now.

Of course, the primary advantage is that you get access to the content as it’s available so that you don’t have to wait till it becomes published.  And if it’s content you want, then content you shall have - there’s now 19 chapters available!

Help shape the book.

One of the reasons that Manning books have such a strong reputation is the result of community involvement. Those who take part in MEAP can then go into the forum and post questions, suggestions, and feedback. And we take all that stuff very seriously.

We had some early anonymous reviewers provide some feedback and we’re incorporating all of their suggestions as well as things that needed more clarification and improvement.

From our perspective, this is a book to help ramp up new users to Flex as fast as possible. It’s another way we’re helping grow the Flex community, so fine tuning this to what people want out of a book is what we want to do!

Where to go for more.

To find out more about this early access program visit: http://www.manning.com/ahmed/

We look forward to your feedback, and providing a quality product.

Thanks!

In 2007 we decided to take on the challenge of writing a Flex 3 book, and although the Flex ecosystem received a fresh round of books shortly after Flex 2 was released, I found that in training people new to Flex that the areas they struggled in were not being addressed by the current set of resources.

The motivation to write this book is rooted in my goal to help the community; as a long time member of the Flex community (going back to Flex V1.0) the focus of my efforts has always been aimed on ramping up those new to Flex. The bigger the Flex community the more we all will benefit from the fruits of everyone’s labor.

Originally we had started off on a path similar to fellow Manning writer Peter Armstrong (see his article on self publishing); the print on demand industry has really evolved over the last year; but after researching I came to the same observation that Peter writes, the problem is not the writing - that’s the easy part! It’s everything after that where a Publisher’s value really comes into play.

We then approached Manning Publishing with our content, concepts, and approach and they exchanged their background, philosophy on tech books, etc… And there was a great match!

So… things have been progressing very quickly, and we’re wrapping up the bulk of the content now. As well, chapters in progress are soon to be available as part of Manning’s early access program (aka MEAP) that allows subscribers to get first glance at a book as it’s being written and have the opportunity to provide feedback (which is used to polish off the final versions).