After being disappointed by other Flex books out there, I finally found a book that delivered, and I’m more than happy to begin recommending it. Where many Flash developers swear by the Essential ActionScript books by Colin Moock, I expect that Programming Flex 2 by Chafic Kazoun and Joey Lott to gain the same reputation. It’s very straightforward, the authors are obviously knowledgeable, and it should be able to get anyone started developing with Flex.

One of my favorite parts is the forward written by Mark Anders, Senior Principle Scientist at Adobe. Mark gives a detailed history of his move from Microsoft, as the leader behind the team that created ASP.NET, to Adobe where he helped shape Flex 2 and ActionScript 3.0, the language behind the framework. He finishes with a look at the future, including Flex’s support for the upcoming Apollo runtime.

Early chapters focus on the basic parts of Flex. As expected, the authors give a look at ActionScript 3.0, MXML, the tools behind Flex, like Flex Builder, FDS, and even SWFObject, one of the best embedding solutions for placing SWF files into webpages. I’m impressed that Chafic and Joey took the time to mention SWFObject because it’s my personal favorite, and because the Flex SDK includes Adobe’s own solution, so mentioning others written by third-parties isn’t strictly necessary. Consider that an extra point for attention to detail.

The Framework Fundamentals chapter goes well beyond fundamentals, in my opinion, but that’s not a bad thing. In fact, I think readers will file away a lot of useful information, such as how the Flex SystemManager and preloaders are handled, and move forward with some great knowledge that they might normally discover much later. The authors introduce ApplicationDomains right away too. Personally, I rarely find myself using these, but again, always good to know about them.

In the next few chapters we read about layout, standard components, and containers. These chapters give the reader their core knowledge of the visual side of Flex. The layout chapter extensively covers layout components like Canvas, HBox, and VBox, constaint-based layout, and even some less-obvious containers like Forms, FormItems, and FormHeadings. The UIComponent and Container chapters, as you would expect, go into detail about each of the available component. I found myself a little bored by these chapters, but I’ve worked with most of these components for well over a year, so you can imagine that I’m familiar with the available features.

The rest of the book’s chapters cover other specific features that the framework provides. We have a chapter on managers for drag-and-drop, modal pop-up items, and mouse cursors, some information on media such as sound and video, effects and transitions, application states, and styles and skinning. Of particular note are chapters on working with data, including validation and formatting, connecting to remote data sources like web services, socket servers, and initiating file uploads and downloads. I was impressed to see a chapter that focused on Flash Player’s LocalConnection and SharedObjects.

The final two chapters of the book focus on components. First, we take a look at building components with MXML. For good reason, the authors recommend breaking up an application into multiple modular pieces. It’s all straightforward, with a focus on encapsulation and other important considerations for object-oriented programming. The last chapter shows the reader how to build a new component with pure ActionScript 3. The content is focused and to-the-point. Seeing as I have a strong interest in building custom components, I found myself a bit disappointed by such a short, well, introduction. Certainly, the authors wrote a strong chapter that includes all the essential details, but I simply hoped for a bit more. As they say at the conclusion, though, an entire book could be written about Flex component development. I can definitely agree, so I guess I shouldn’t complain too much. 😉

Personally, I learn the most when I dive right into the Flex documentation. However, I know a lot of folks like to grab a physical book and read it a little further away from their computer monitor. Programming Flex 2 is the best hard-copy source for Flex information that I’ve found so far. It’s a little less dry than the documentation, and Chafic and Joey present you with the essential knowledge to get you started developing with Flex very quickly. You’ll find this book on my personal list of recommendations, and I hope you enjoy as I have.