First let me start off by thanking Mike Potter (Program Manager, Developer Relations at Adobe) for sending me this book. According to Mike,

"Every once in a while I’ll go through Amazon and find wishlists with Flex or ActionScript books on them."

So if you dont have a wishlist set up at Amazon, you should do so now, you never know who may be willing to make your day. Thanks again Mike! Now on to the book...

The Essential Guide to Flex 2 with ActionScript 3.0 was a good book. There I've said it, I liked the book. As with all Friends Of Ed Books (or at least the ones I have in my library) this book is extremely easy to read cover to cover. I dont know what it is about the books this company puts out, but they are by far the easy programming/technical books to read that I have ever purchased. I am constantly recommending the Foundation series books to people new to Actionscript, and/or Flash because of how easy they are to read.

The author, Charles E. Brown covers a wide array of subjects in this book which does well to give an insight into how much there really is to learn. I have to say though that the title of the book is rather misleading when it comes down to the content presented. The fact that the book is titled "The Essential Guide..." is where I have the problem. This book should have absolutely been part of the foundation series, in fact could have been a primer to a Foundation series book as it really just skims over most of the aspects of Flex 2 and ActionScript 3.0. The major flaw of this book, in my opinion, is that it tries to cover way to much. With nearly 60 pages devoted to ColdFusion, another 22 to Charting, and over 100 more to case studies, that's roughly 38% of the book devoted to option components and case studies. Case studies, however, at least benefit hose that have become comfortable enough with the concepts to try and put it into practice with an example, but if your not a ColdFusion developer, or have purchased the Charting component add on for Flex, there's 80 pages that have no relevance for you.

Having said all of that I think this book is a great start for those with zero knowledge of Flex OR Flash. If your a Java or ColdFusion developer who has yet to explore the world of Flash or Flex this is a great intro book to help you decide if its something you want to investigate further. If your someone who has done any amount of working with Flex (or even playing around, as in my case) or your an experienced Flash/ActionScript developer, this book will seem very low level to you. There where several moments during the book where I though "huh, that's interesting..." but I kept waiting for that one big moment where I though "ahh this is a book I will refer back to"... that moment just never came for me.

The author has set up a website as an extension to the book which can be found at www.CharlesEBrown.net. At the time I was reading the book, and at the time of this post, the site is mostly a short description of the book with a few coming soon links to Java, ColdFusion, and PHP tutorials. I will keep checking in on the site and post back here if/when I see any of the tutorials go live.

While this review may seem very negative (that wasn't the intention when I sat down to write this), I wanted to offer my honest perspective as a Flash guy reading a book about Flex. I encourage you to also read the reviews from other consumers who may offer additional insight.

Note:I think I should also clarify my background just a tad for perspectives sake. I am NOT a Flex developer by trade, I am a Flash guy. I have done a few small (read : extremely small) projects in Flex, tinkering around more than anything else. Flex was a lot easier to pick up than I had originally anticipated, and I think it wouldn't take much to get real comfortable using Flex to build a large scale applications. So for other Flash developers out there who are considering checking out Flex, its a lot cooler than you might think, give it a try!

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 8th, 2007 at 4:04 pm and is filed under Books, Flex. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.