Getting started with Flex 3

Jack D. Herrington is an engineer, author and presenter whose mission is to expose his fellow engineers to new technologies. That covers a broad spectrum, from demonstrating programs that write other programs in the book Code Generation in Action. Providing techniques for building customer centered web sites in PHP Hacks. All the way writing a how-to on audio blogging called Podcasting Hacks. All of which make great holiday gifts and are available online here, and at your local bookstore. Jack also writes articles for O’Reilly, DevX and IBM Developerworks.

Emily Kim, President, Trilemtry, Inc., has co-authored and contributed to a number of books including a college-level workbook about the Internet and various ColdFusion books. Besides being a writer, Emily is also a programmer, designer and a Abobe Master Instructor.

Adobe sent me 10 books – Getting started with Flex 3 and I’m giving away all of them to 10 developers who are willing to comment or contact with their name and mailing address.

Discover how easy RIA development can be with this one-of-a-kind handbook from the Adobe Developer Library. Several clear, step-by-step mini-tutorials teach you about web services, event handling, designing user interfaces with reusable components, and more. After finishing this guide, you’ll be able to build Flash applications ranging from widgets to full-featured RIAs using the Flex SDK and Flex Builder 3.0.

The book have a quick introduction to the Flex Builer 3 IDE, how to install it and start working with it. Besides the many other small and nifty examples on widgets, plugins, dashboards, desktop apps, there is also a nice Flickr Viewer example which is worth looking if you want to try out some Flickr API and AS3 codes. The book also touches on some of the generic containers – Application, Canvas, Form, Panel, etc.

I would not really rate this as a must-have book but is a good primer for those starting out with Flex 3 or those jumping to Flex 3 from prior version of Flex.