Learning Flex 4 – Oreilly book review

An article by Stefan Horochovec    No Comments

Hi there!

The purpose of this post is doing a review on the book Learning Flex 4, Alaric Cole, Elijah Robison.

The book starts with a good introduction, where he leads the reader to know a little of the Flash Plataform, explaining clearly the differences between Flex for Web and Desktop, making a good introduction to the development environment. At this point, the developer who is starting in Flex already feels comfortable with his new tool.

In their sequence, the authors explains in very straightforward and clear the fundamentals of the ActionScript language, the way of spreading events. At that moment I felt a missing of explanation a bit more detail about the construction of custom events.

At the DataBinding there was a very detailed explanation with several examples, including about two-way databinding, however, some details have not been addressed, and generate many questions to the developer, for example, binding between a text field and a numeric attribute in an model.

The authors make a sequence of chapters designed to create forms with navigation controls, where they can be implemented include the validations, formatters, restrictions, with clear examples of how it can be done to implement each of these situations.

It was also made an explanation on the use of States, which suffered a major change in the Flex 4 SDK. The use of states has not been much explored by the authors, but for beginners in the new SDK is helpful explanation.

The book also shows techniques for creating Styles and Skinning in Flex applications. The book makes a very interesting explanation on the implementation of FXG and its use in Skinning.

The book is detailed enough for the most part, with clear examples for learning. I consider the book suitable for those who are starting the Flex development, and also for developers who are starting their studies in the Flex 4 SDK.

Here is the statement my all to the book, surely you can help your learning of technology if you are already a Flex developer, and certainly is of great help to those who are starting their journey.

Congratulations to the authors and Oreilly by excellent edition of the book.

I received access to an electronic copy of this book at no charge from O’Reilly Media Inc. for the purpose of writing this review

Regards