jun :: realeyes

If you are planning on taking the Flex certification, wanting to fill some gaps in your knowledge of Flex, or want to find a cheap alternative or supplement to taking the Certified Instructor-led training, Adobe Flex 2 Training from the Source will deliver. (Btw, clicking on that link will take you to sample chapter excerpts.)

The book content is well organized and consists of a just-in-time learning methodology. You start a chapter and receive a summary of what you will be working on. After that the rest of the chapter is hands-on while offering tidbits of information on new concepts and material as they first make their way into the development during the labs.

As an Adobe Certified Instructor in Flex, reading through this book reminded me of the course materials in the Adobe authorized curriculum, following a similar flow and teaching style. One thing I liked about this book is that even if you had taken the standard authorized training courses – Flex 2: Developing Rich Client Applications and Flex 2: Data and Communications – this book offers material that’s not covered in either of those classes. The bonus is that this additional material is presented in easily digestible chunks with good hands-on labs for reinforcement. Some examples of the value-added material are:

• Lesson 12 – Using Drag and Drop
• Lesson 15 – Using the History Manager
• Lesson 23 – Printing From Flex
• Lesson 24 – Using Shared Objects

Another nice thing about the content in the book is the Tips, Notes, and Cautions scattered about. Tips offer alternate ways to accomplish the task at hand. Notes, add some additional background information not necessary for accomplishing the task but good to know. The Cautions do a good job of letting you know of spots in the labs that may cause you to pull hairs out if you’re not paying attention.

The authors are skilled in discussing advanced concepts accessible to new Flex developers seemingly without even breaking a sweat. One example was during Lesson 10 Creating Custom Components with ActionScript 3.0 – method overriding, chrome, rawChildren, and updateDisplayList().

As far as the labs were concerned, through much of the book you are working through a “Flexgrocer” suite of applications. To me working on an app from start to finish, using each of the new concepts as you go along is a very powerful way to learn the material while realizing the WIIFM’s.

In regard to the print format, all too often I’ll see a tech book with interesting material that’s in a small font and jumbled together without sufficient whitespace…headache and instant turn-off. I thought that this book made good use of typefaces, whitespace and I appreciated the size of the font throughout.

After all this praise, I’m sure you’re wondering if there was anything I didn’t like about the book…there were two things:

1. The lab files were not Flex Projects exported from Flex Builder, instead they were zipfiles with just the source. In other words, it would have been nice if the lab files were an archive file containing a “Training from the Source” Flex Builder workspace with the corresponding lesson projects.

2. Within the chapters themselves, the lab files were not broken into chunks, in other words you couldn’t skip the first lab in a Lesson and start working on the second or third lab in a lesson without running into something being missing or potentially broken. In other words, this book was designed to have someone work a Lesson from start to finish.

Now that I’ve left the negative taste in your mouth, let me remove it by saying, this book is definitely a worthwhile addition to your Flex library.

It is a good supplement to the authorized training, and is excellent study material for the Flex 2 Developer exam. Just to give you an idea, if you look at the topic and objectives in the exam guide, the only thing this book doesn’t really seem to cover is UML or Use Cases…but to be fair I wouldn’t expect it to…

All in all, bravo to Tapper, Boles, Talbot, Elmore, and Labriola. Thanks for the excellent read!