Peachpit Press, publisher of my forthcoming “Effortless Flex 4 Development” book, has published another excerpt of the book online, free for anyone to read. (Technically New Riders is the publisher, but New Riders is owned by Peachpit.) This article represents a few pages from Chapter 4 of the book, “Event Management”. It follows the previous excerpt (also from Chapter 4), which you should probably read first if you haven’t. The first excerpt largely discusses event handling theory; in this excerpt you’ll see how to turn that theory into actual code. Even if you don’t yet know Flex and ActionScript, you should still be able to follow along. Most importantly, Flex is largely an event-driven approach to application development (conversely, Flash Professional is primarily a timeline-driven approach), so this section is really a key insight into what it’s like to use Flex.
I’m just about to do two “5 Tips in 5 Days” blog posts for Peachpit’s site. One will be specifically on the Flex 4 framework and the other will be on Flash Builder. Flash Builder, in case you’re not familiar with it, used to be called Flex Builder and is just a commercial IDE for developing using Flex. You don’t have to use Flash Builder as the Flex 4 framework and its SDK are available for free, but it does ease the process significantly. The book does not assume you’re using Flash Builder, either. There are specific instructions for how to create Flex applications using a text editor and the command-line IDE, but there are also areas that cover how you would do X or Y using Flash Builder. Most of the book focuses on the Flex framework, so it doesn’t matter what development tools you’re using.
Will the “5 Tips in 5 Days” contain content separate from your upcoming Flex book “Effortless Flex 4 Development” or will they contain additions to the books content?
Hey Jason, thanks for the questions. The “5 Tips in 5 Days” posts will be separate from the book in that they won’t depend on having seen the book but there may be some overlap with what’s also in the book.
Really looking forward to your book,but i really want to know what audience do you target?I already have some Flex experience(from two books-training from the source and essential guide to flex 3) so when i saw that you will be writing a book on Flex i was very excited,but if the book is only 400 pages long is it more a begginers book or you go into some intermediate-advanced topics?
Hello Mirko, thanks for your interest in the book (and my apologies for the delayed reply). As for your question, I don’t know what topics you would qualify as “intermediate-advanced” but I think of the book as beginners-intermediate level. It’s intended for those just starting with Flex or without extensive Flex experience. The book uses PHP for the server-side stuff, so I expect some readers would be PHP developers just learning Flex for the first time. Thanks again!
Hi Larry,thank you for your response.English is not my native language,so by intermediate-advanced topics i really meant how deep will you go explaining one subject(web services,custom events etc.),but by reading some of the book on Safari i would say the depth of topics is just right.Also on Safari i read the table of contents and there is a mention of an example application,but reading TOC on your blog there is no mention of example application.Anyway,i am preordering your book on Amazon!!
Hello Mirko. You’re English is fine; I asked about intermediate-advanced because different people have a different sense of what “intermediate” means. Thanks for the feedback on what you’ve read so far. I’m glad it’s feeling right to you. As for the example application, unfortunately there wasn’t room to formally include that. However, there are a couple of examples through the course of the book that get developed pretty well. I’ll try to supplement the material through this blog, as appropriate. Thanks again for your interest in the book!