Adobe Flex 3 Bible by David Gassner doesn’t contain anything ground breaking or spectacular, but overall I was impressed with both the breadth and depth of the book.  Granted, at roughly the thickness of a real Bible (978 pages including index), it would be quite a shame not to achieve some depth.

What I especially appreciated was the in depth treatment of data access in Flex, particularly when it comes to integration with an application server of some sort.  When I began learning Flex it was difficult to find documentation explaining how this was done, and was glossed over in the books I had in a very unsatisfying manner (even in my favorite Programming Flex 2, I’m afraid).  I had to mostly fend for myself by pouring through example code.  It took me about 2 weeks of concentrated effort before I was able to set up my own project to use FDS and JBoss.

Adobe Flex 3 Bible would have been a big time saver for me at that time.  It devotes over 200 pages explaining how to set up and use BlazeDS, AMFPHP, ColdFusion and ASP.NET for data access with Flex.  I was really impressed by this.  Not only is it good information, but it’s presented in a way that’s easy to understand.  I’d recommend this book to beginners on the basis of this section alone.

One of the cover’s bullet points state “Create desktop applications with AIR” and was a bit misleading.  There’s only a small section toward the back of the book that deals specifically with AIR.  It’s not technically incorrect though, because there are insights and information about developing AIR applications interspersed throughout the book (and considering how similar Flex development and AIR development are in terms of syntax, this is not surprising).  If you’re looking to jump right into AIR development and want all the details in one place, please don’t get this book for that reason.