I wasn't too convinced about this book @ the beginning. It really is perfect for any beginners, and those seeking to get familiar w/Flex. I've been designing/coding in Flash for almost a decade now, and this book sure made the transition allot easier. The only reason I gave it a 4 and not a 5 is because the examples are all related, so if you're into building up the same example as you progress thru the book, this is perfect.

Invested way more time in this book than I thought I would, ... received way more value that I predicted I would.

After quite a few weeks of trying to find time to finish up the last couple of chapters in this book I am now just finding time to write a review that I thought would be completed way before now. Between the full-time job and other projects, it has been difficult to wrap this one up ... but I am glad that I did. Just in time for the v3.0.

About the Authors: At first glance of the Bios section you will know that the authors of this book are way more than qualified. Jeff Tapper was on the MAX conference stage last year and I have personally attended the Adobe Authorized Flex Train the Trainer event with Matt Boles. (excellent instructor and technical expert to say the least) The other authors I have not met but they have well recognized names in the industry.

This book is 581 pages and consists of 25 task driven chapters that walk you through an entire project from start to finish. (The Flex Grocer) It follows the traditional "Macromedia Training from the Source" format and is very well written. The TFS book series has always been a personal favorite of mine and they are typically tightly coded with consistent quality. It makes me very unhappy to imagine that the TFS books will cease to exist or even more frightfully be replaced by the Classroom in a Book series. We'll see what happens?

The book is almost error free and there is a site that the authors have published that references any errata. The book eases you into working with simple XML data structures and controls and moves you toward FDS and also includes data management with CFCs. There is a nice introduction to the value object pattern as well as ActionScript if you may be new to either of these topics. You will probably need a supplemental book if you are not familiar with ActionScript.

I had already attended the five day Flex Train the Trainer session before I started on this book and my goal of working through this book was to make sure that everything started to sink in within a reasonable time frame after attending the class. Some of the concepts or items that I found to be of high value included a refresher on event flow and event bubbling, formatters and validators, and the history manager. Lesson 18 was my first introduction to charting data in Flex and as you probably would guess, Flex makes this a cakewalk.

No doubt this book is a FIVE STAR. I am sure that the authors have plans of updating it for Flex 3.0.

This book does a great job at providing carefully checked step by step exercises. On that level it is 5 stars. I am on chapter 8 and found no errors and I type in the code examples. However I did find unexpected results - mentioned later. There is a lot of meticulous checking to be sure the progression of the examples are correct.

The content also shows a professional developer approach to applying the technology. This does not appear to be a book written from another language's perspective such as an Actionscript programmer trying to write a Flex book. The author is focused on Flex and exposing the functionality in how you best would apply it. So I would say the content is top notch, but again I am the student and this is my professional developer gut experience making the call.

This book uses one grocery store shopping cart example all the way through. This is boring as heck to see that example chapter after chapter. Now the book does provide starting files for each chapter in case you messed up. However the authors were forced to add more and more to support the development of the application. This resulted in situations such as chapter 7 that went way overboard to complete the progression of the application to the end. Rather than focusing efforts on specifics of Flex you were repeating work to support the app. You would say enough already. Chapter 7 took me 3 hours to complete as it predicts in the beginning. It could have been writted for 1 hour and covered the lesson points about components and provided a larger variety of examples.

You also are doing things to support the progression of the application that later you undo for changing architecture. This makes understanding the application more difficult.

Despite the effort to provide start files at the beginning of each lesson, there are intermediate exercise steps with testing points within the lessons. There are no files to support you if you error or if there are errors in the exercise steps. One I came across is Lesson 8. The first "Displaying the Categories Using a HorizontalList and ItemRender" did not work for me. This prevented me from starting the next section in the lesson. I went over and over the steps. Stuck for 1 hour I finally deleted all the project files and started over and it worked. Would have been nice to have samples of what I should have had at the end of that segment, so I will not know what went wrong.

I went to the site for the book to see if there was an errata. There was not and there is no place to provide feedback for this type of item. Hey book companies (live errata like live docs moderated) increases quality of your technical products.

The book is not a sit down and read as some of the exercise steps can be as many as 20 or more. There is good annotation for the steps but not enough to read very long without becoming fully lost. I would say you cannot read any of the lessons (after the first few) all the way through and understand them without doing them and practicing.

I would not recommend using the Flex SDK to try to absorb this book. You really need Flexbuilder to be productive in following the book. The exercises can be done with just the SDK, just be prepared for a longer work period.

I see comments that the book is for advanced and then for beginners. You do have to have programming experience to follow the book.

I am an advanced Flash AS2 and now AS 3 developer. I wanted to get the gist of Flex for back end AS apps. It has been difficult with this book and I would say I am lost in the example most of the time. I have done the Quick Starts at the Adobe site which do have smaller simpler to follow exercises before I ventured into this book.

Bottom line, this is a great step by step book the shows off Flex features for building a shopping cart application. It covers a wide range of Flex features. It is error checked and provides useful commentary in the steps.

The exercises are way too long to keep focus if you follow along. There is no variety so boooooring.

The book is geared toward experienced developers looking to jump into Flex development. Flex can be challenging for developers who are used to the traditional page based architecture of web applications. This book does a great job of demonstrating the differences. It also briefly covers some advanced topics like shared objects and skinning. This book is not a complete guide, but it does provide a good primer so that you can easily move onto more advanced training.

If you are a newbie and like to have your hand held at each step, then this book is for you. However, if you are an experienced developer, the constant step 1, step 2, ...step n approach can be extremely annoying and distracting. At least it was for me.

For experienced developers looking to quickly ramp up on Flex 2, I would recommend "Programming Flex 2" by Kazoum & Lott instead. It gave better explanations of the options available and when one was more appropriate than the other.

I found this book to be very useful. I have been working with Flash(AS) since version 5 and needed a good introduction to Flex. This book did the job.
Almost all topics are covered, with sufficient details to form a good understanding of concepts and practice for using Flex.
Only negative remark I have, is that it only covers integration with Coldfusion. I would have liked to see more background on AMFPHP, which is currently the fastest Remoting service.

I was a vocal Flex skeptic, this book turned that around quickly. I'd recommend this as the entry point for anyone looking to learn Flex 2. And, I'd recommend learning Flex because it's the future of rich UI.

This is a very nice book ... Personally, I think they could have more...however, it is more than enough to get your feet wet!

We've spent $3000+ getting introductory courses into this software, and this book may have done the trick. I'm still glad I had the courses because they gave me some instant leverage. But I didn't walk away with knowledge in areas that were absolutely important.

For instance, my class didn't cover anything on the combo/drop down boxes and how to get them to connect to outside data sources, such as a XML file. HOWEVER, this book had several samples on connecting to various data sources with combo boxes.

This book is a life saver. Combo boxes play a big role in my apps.

Anyway, it "walks you through the process." According to some who've bought the book, it seems tedious. But the programming language is very specific and very detailed. This book explains everything in a rational step by step manner, and informing you of relevant things which are associated with the lesson. So if your working in the combo-box area for instance, the book will also give you detailed pointers on data services... not just the combo box. (Data services is a term we use in flex to describe how we connect to data, servers, or some scripts to execute a command...)

Also, the book is set up so I can either get something quickly to do something specific, or I can go through the lesson. VERY HANDY. Each chapter also tells you how long the lesson will take. Great for planning your training.

I hesistated buying this book because of the reviews I read until I had no choice but to buy it because none of my expensive 'authorized' training manuals gave me the critical information I needed. DON'T MAKE THE SAME MISTAKE.

This is your best source for information. Make no mistake about that.

This book is a great resource to learn MXML, the Flex Builder (plugin/app), and fundamentals of ActionScript 3 and the Flex framework. You will find that slapping an interface together is quite fun and can even get most general projects done with pure MXML, and this book does a good job at showing that.

ActionScript hardcores may not get "enough" from this book, and that's because it's not an AS3 book by itself.

Video is not covered, which isn't a simple concept considering there's a lot to learn in the Flex world, but video deserves more mention within the book.

step by step instructions are way too tedious. the material can be explained in half a page usually bloat to 4,5 pages.

I purchased this book to learn a little more about Flex and what it could do for our website. I'm a web developer and database developer but my object oriented programming skills are limited. The first 4 chapters of this book were great and easy to follow but you can clearly see the author change for chapter 5. I was completely lost from that point on. Like I said, my OOP skills are limited but the layout of chapter 5 on was poorly written. It's a great introduction book but know your object oriented programming before buying it!

The book offers good introduction to Flex 2 and includes many tips as well. But the big problem for this books is the writing style. The examples are usually modified/enhanced examples from previous chapters. But the authors relentlessly go through each line changes with a huge paragraph; it often looks something like "remove this line, add this component, and save". A usual half page worth of content is bloated to 3, 4 pages of tedious step-by-step instructions. I personally would prefer to see the code changes between 2 versions directly, something like a side-by-side code snippet comparison would do the trick.

Great and thorough introduction to Flex2. One recommendation to authors would be to outline the project in the beginning of the book so that as developer reader knows what is he trying to achieve in the project, besides learning :)

Although this book covers come very useful areas of programming in Flex 2, the quality of the writing is so poor as to make it too tedious to recommend. It's understandable that great programmers may not be the best at constructing sentences. It's unforgivable that proof readers and editors let this sort of thing go to press. Mind you that the example code seems pretty good (except for naming conventions mentioned below). It's everything else that should have been properly proof read and corrected.

To be specific this book suffers from extremely poor punctuation, run-on sentences and poorly structured explanations. So you might think "Why should I care? I'm looking to learn Flex not enjoy a good novel." Well, having to re-read paragraphs multiple times (to try to understand what they mean) might convince you that this is a real problem.

Compiling a Flex 2 file with one extra curly bracket will throw an error. As programmers we have to attend to this level of detail. Why didn't the authors, proof readers, editors and publishers expect readers to read the TEXT to the same level of detail before they published this book?

As for the structure, maybe this is just a personal preference. The authors walk the reader through each code line change - describing what to type and where to type it. To me this feels as enjoyable as being told how to bake a cake ONE LETTER AT A TIME; you've got to assemble the words in your head, then sentences, then organize it all into the proper steps to take. Please just explain the idea, show the code and show the results. Make it more visual instead of holding my hand through every keystroke.

Another complaint I have is that the Debugging chapter is at the very end of the book. It would have saved me a lot of time earlier on if I had known that it's possible to view the details of all objects while debugging a file (just set break points and dig into the Variables area).

Yet one more complaint about the book is that it does not seem to follow any naming standards. Coming from application development, where hundreds and sometimes thousands of fields are used, how variables are named is very important to me. Does the world of Flex development have naming standards? It's impossible to tell from this book. Besides, when one is returning to a chapter to review details it wastes a lot of time when you have to also search to determine what "aItems" means for instance. Would it really be so hard to name variables meaningfully? Shouldn't the concept of egoless programming be an integral part of this book?

Sorry for the rant but I'm spending hours trying to slog through this poorly written book - the only complete one on Flex 2 at this point. It's very frustrating. Hopefully by the time you read this there will be other books to choose from.

In the mean time I'd suggest the Lynda.com Flex 2/ActionScript training and the Safari rough cut of Programming Flex 2.

Uses a prctiacl example to take the reader through the nuts and bolts of Flex, Flex Builder, and FDS. If your New to Flex and not an expereinced developer, this is the starting point.

I am only halfway through this book but, after less than two days, it helped me create a simple Flex 2 application. I am proficient in Flash 8 and ActionScript 2, but I struggled a bit with the Flex framework. The two negative reviews are strange. You cannot call this low book "low quality." I've done every exercise up to the halfway point - and I haven't found a single error! The guy who reports typos is just wrong (i.e., "end " implies "". This won't give you trouble...), the ones he cites are not.

Also, I don't quite understand the point of the reviewer who would prefer a "conceptual method." I don't know about you, but my goal is to learn how to use the tool...doing concrete exercises is a terrific way to learn concepts. Especially in the flex framework, a concept sounds good until you try and code it. I learn much better with examples. Also, the focus here is not ActionScript 3.0, rather it's about the Flex development environment. I like AS so I sort of resisted Flex, but wow, it's really powerful - I can't believe how easy it is to do some things.

Wow! I'd recommend this to anyone using Flex 2. The authors have done an amazing job with presenting concepts in a well-organized and compelling manner. The book follows the development of a fictional, on-line grocery store. I rarely follow these step-by-step books as the authors intended, but the concepts in this book evolve as the store is developed, and the exercises are clear and concise. I followed the book right through from beginning to end.

I've been developing a significant project with Flex 2 for the past 8 months. I'm not a newbie as far as Flex or ActionScript are concerned, but I got a lot of really useful information out of this book. Some reaffirmed what I've been doing, while others gave me tweaks (and a few outright "So THAT's the way to handle that!" moments).

The book does a great job at describing how and why to do most tasks in Flex 2. Looking for a tutorial on how to work with HTTP calls? How about data sets, events, custom components, charting, styles, skins, transitions, printing, shared object, or debugging? They're all in there, as well as a few similar exercises done with ActionScript vs. MXML.

The one drawback I see here is in the area of Flex Data Services (FDS). Personally, I think they could have dropped the limited introduction to the many advanced features of FDS and published a separate book on that (which hopefully Adobe Press will do anyway).

The book includes a CD-ROM with a preset, developer copy of ColdFusion to work through some of the exercises. It would have been nice if they had included the FDS components on the CD, too, but it can be downloaded from Adobe's website.

At any rate, this is an excellent resource for anyone using Flex 2.

This is the book you need to get started with Flex. It takes you through an entire real world project from the simple to the complex in a logical, thorough manner.

I love Adobe products. I have used them all and Flex 2 is a promising and powerful tool to add to the family of Adobe products. I bought this book in hopes of learning how to use Flex 2. But it has let me down. The book started off strong. Teaching me and then having me try it on my own without explaination. But then I hit page 61. Page 61 talks about source code and has you work using it. But it has a huge typo, which cost me many hours of failure and frustration. The book says: After the closing tag When it should read "After the <\mx:ApplicationControlBar>" For a newbie in source code that is a huge typo!! They left out the "<\" I figured it was the only instance of it and I'd forgive the authors and publishers this once. But no!!! again I encounter the same typo on page 78. "Below the tag" It should read "Below the <\mx:Model> tag" Twice I have written out source code in the wrong place due to a over looked closing "<\". I hope the publishers go back and correct these mistakes. If your going to publish a book about how to use source code and give examples. For god sakes make sure they are correct.
I am only on page 79, and I have a feeling I will encounter many more examples of this thru the 587 page book.
The book should have also been written in 2 styles. One for designers, and one for source code lovers.

With years of experience in Flash and Actionscript programming, I was still having a hard time getting my first Flex applications to work. There was always some small detail I was missing, resulting in hours of searching the net for clues.

"Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source" has provided me with the answers to most of the missing details and some that I didn't know (yet) that I was missing. I think the book gives a good introduction to the concept of Flex. The natural progression through the book is also very easy to follow. All concepts are accompanied by code examples that are explained in a simple way.

What I'm still missing after reading this book, is a more detailed explanation on XMLListCollections, ArrayCollections and their uses together with external data. More details on subclassing the AS classes could also be useful, as I'm surely going to make my own custom classes after reading this book. Then again, one book can't cover it all. I'm looking for a good AS3 book covering this subject.

If you want to learn Flex, buy this book. Don't waste your time working it out yourself while waiting for possibly better Flex 2 books to be published.

This book is in my opinion very low quality. I'm tired so I'm just going to make points listed in bullet format:

1. They stress OOP best practices all day long but don't follow them until near the end (only they don't tell you they're going to do that) so if you know OOP you will be frustrated with all the public class variables.

2. I wanted the conceptual information, not the how-to. It makes for a lot of work sifting through all the "exercises" to try and find nuggets of new information.

3. They can't seem to decide wether they book is for Novice ActionScript coders or advanced so they are either boring your mind out with ActionScript (super basics) or they are making assumptions that you are already well versed with ActionScript 3.0. They tell me what I already know and don't tell me what I want to know.

That's all I can think of at the moment.

Oh and the reviewer who says that Jeff Trapper is the one who does the Total Training DVD is mistaken. I have the DVD and it is James Talbot who hosts that DVD.

The best FLex book I've ever read was by Steven Webster and Alistair McLeod written for the intial version of Flex. But if you review it, you'll see that most of the functionality of Flex2 is covered in this book and it's written WAY better.

Having said all that. If you want a workbook, this is the book for you.

If you want to learn Flex2 and you prefer learning the concepts with explainations of concepts rather than skipping important concepts and just showing how to do it then you won't like this book.

By the way, the Total Trainng DVD is almost the same in the areas that are laking mentioned above. It's almost as if it is just a DVD version of the book (not exactly but very close).

I am now looking very forward Flex2 Programming by Joey Lott.

Jeff Tapper understands how to teach people this software. This book is great by itself, and even better as a study guide to help you follow along with the Total Training DVD for Flex 2 that Mr. Tapper also hosts. If you need to learn Flex 2, you need to get this book. If you think you already know Flex 2 because you are already a Flash whiz, you STILL need to get this book.