The attraction of this book is the collection of 11 extended examples. Each is a case study in how to use AIR to code desktop applications. There is a slight irony here in the trajectory taken by Adobe. Its original products, and probably still its main revenue sources, were for desktop usages. Think Postscript and PDF. But the rise of the Web caused it to develop Flash for web applications. Now here, we come back to the desktop.

The book's examples involve Java as the programming language. Extensive usage is also made of XML and HTML. You are encouraged to use the examples as a basis for modification for your own needs. The examples are verbose, but luckily you can also get these from the accompanying website.

The examples do vary in their complexity. You may want to pay especial attention to the Map application. This involves accessing a SQL database that comes with AIR. The code shows how to make the necessary tables. If you have in mind a "serious" application with lots of data, then often you'll need a SQL database for it. The example here shows that this can be straightforward.

This is truly an amazing book. Seldom are books (like this one) written which provide applicable programs that I can use to create more advanced applications on. This is a must buy for the serious Adobe Air programmer. I just completed an application based on the code in this book. Check it out on Youtube and Google Code at

Adobe Air Collada-Papervision3D Viewer

[...]

Many Many Many Thanks to the authors!!! I plan to write many more applications based on the code in this book. This book has saved me hours and hours and hours of work!

Adobe AIR investigates 11 practical application from start to finish. Music players, video players, slideshows, Mini CMS (whoo hoo!) are some of the apps.

This book is NOT ideal for beginners, and intermediate developers might miss some of the jewels. The authors basically dump TONS of excellent OOP code on you and only point out the AIR specific bits. For example, the authors will extend classes, call public variables instantiated in super-classes, and override custom abstract methods and not even mention it. If you're not comfortable with this, you may wonder what is going on. You can of course still learn about some AIR methods and pick up some tricks, but the book will sit on your desk until you've learned enough to attack it.

What really excites me is that the examples were written to be cannibalized and improved on. If you are proficient in FLEX and Actionscript and just want a jump start to build your next app - this is the book.

The one drawback I have encountered is, even though the sample apps are not built with expansive classes, a UML or other application diagram would be nice for each application. That would just be the icing on top of icing.