We are considered adopting Adobe’s new Flex2 framework for some development at work, so I picked up this book last week to learn a little about the capabilities of the technology. Communicating technical information is always difficult, and this book has some strengths and weakness. It is comprehensive and clear, and it does a good job communicating to multiple skill levels. On the downside, the book feels a little disjointed. Either the author changed his coding style half-way through, or the sample code was written by different developers–bracket placement varies throughout the code samples, for instance. Also, while there are examples in every chapter, they rarely refer to one another, so it’s hard to see how everything fits together. A handful of examples progressively developed over the length of the book would have been nice. Finally, the chapters don’t seem to follow a well thought out order. Information on including media and effects into your application appear long before information on data binding and communicating with back-end services. This is a very Adobe Flash way of thinking, but given that Flex is intended for developing applications and not multimedia content, the chapters on accessing data should have come before the chapters on creating eye-candy. Overall, it’s an adequate book and would serve a Flex developer well.
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