Unlike other Flex books, AdvancED Flex Application Development: Building Rich Media X by R Blank, Hasan Otuome, Omar Gonzalez, and Chris Charlton (enough authors, guys?) doesn’t cover Flex with a lot of little examples that introduce the features of Flex to newbies. Instead, the authors present a bit about Flex through a look at an application they built called Rich Media X. Rather than cover all the same-old, same-old Flex basics, this book covers the process of building the application and many of the considerations they had to make during the process. I think it’s great that Flex books are starting to move into a wider variety of material, and I hope this is the first of many.

What’s most interesting in this book, in my opinion, is the section on planning. Every Java head (and probably his mother too) knows all about requirements and design documents. In the Flash world, a lot of coders don’t have any experience with this sort of traditional software engineering stuff. It was great to see the authors spend time talking about finding requirements, determining how much time they had available (and inevitably, what needed to wait until a future version), and things like wireframes and various other diagrams. I honestly wished they’d spent another chapter or two on this subject. I think the Flex development community would benefit from a more engineering-focused book that has an ActionScript twist.

One thing I didn’t like was the actual application the authors presented. Rich Media X is more of a distributed set of applications that Adobe User Groups can opt-into individually, and it’s very different than the traditional Flex app. While it’s good to show that Flex can do crazy and interesting stuff, the subject of this book is very abstract compared to most Flash and Flex books. Combine that with an app that requires a reader to wrap her head around its very purpose and you have a very confusing read. I found myself switching contexts too often. They’d slip in a chapter on how to specifically do something like styling in Flex, and suddenly everything would change as I learned about installing Drupal or what makes a good advertising platform. Not to say that learning about Drupal is a bad thing. In fact, I think the topic of technology integration with Flex made the book a little more interesting.

At the end, there was a “Special Topics” section that covered what I assume were chapters that the authors didn’t know how to integrate with the main content. A chapter on SEO was nice, especially the mention of Ted Patrick’s XSL-based Flex SEO system. On the other hand, the tip of using CSS-hidden HTML content for search engines to crawl was misleading since Google penalizes that behavior. The next chapters about how to build an audio visualizer and what’s new in Flex 3 didn’t fit in at all. The tendency for authors and publishers to say “oh, a new version came out, let’s make sure we add a chapter that covers the new features” is getting old. Either integrate it into the main book’s content, or in the case of this book, don’t include it at all because the topic of the rest of the book wasn’t an overview of the previous version.

Ultimately, while I had some gripes with AdvancED Flex Application Development: Building Rich Media X, it was a nice change of pace for me. I like when tech books experiment with the normal format because I generally hate tech books. This one looked at Flex from the perspective of how to build a big application instead of how to start using Flex. That’s awesome. Personally, I think it tried to fit in a bit too many subjects at once, and maybe some more focus would have made it better. Check it out if the regular “getting started” development book isn’t your style.