Book Review: Foundation: Flex For Designers

[Saint_Michael 3]

The book I am going to review is based off the flex gallery I did and the title of the book is Foundation: Flex for Designers which was written by Greg Goralski and LordAlex Leon. I actually enjoyed this book or rather the Friends of Ed company that produces these books as they provide good information in a step-by-step process, they gives you files that are based on those examples and in short makes it easy to work with. On top of that the book is design to provide several Flex applications and so by the time you finish the book and going through all the examples you would have learn to develop full working applications.

Though it is a simple step-by-step process, they take the time and break it down to you what all the code snippets mean and how they work and with the help of the pictures they use in this book it helps you find out where you have to go to make sure you do it properly. Of course, one of the best things about Flex is that you can run the program in real time to debug it and see how it will look thus savings lots of time to build the package and then uploading all the files to your server or hosting account to see it in action. The reason for that is Flex is an offshoot of Flash or rather it uses flash technology in order to run, thus the reason ActionScript and XML are used exclusively to get the various applications running. Although, Flex does have its own language to set things up and put everything together, you can however use HTML, CSS and even work in PHP and JAVA as well. So there is a big use for this program especially if you connect it to databases with lots of data in it. Of course, the big thing is that you develop a full website out of Flex and again it falls back on using Flash technology in order to make that happen.

Like I mention earlier, Friends of ED have produce some great books for Flex such as Flex Application Development, Flex Solutions: Essential Techniques For Flex 2 And 3 Developers, and The Essential Guide to Flex 3 to name a few. In a way, if plan on learning a new programming language either Flex or Flash or even HTML, then you have to check their books out.