Book Review: Flex Solutions, Essential Techniques for Flex 2 and 3 Developers

I first came across Flex Solutions, Essential Techniques for Flex 2 and 3 Developers, by Marco Casario, several months ago.  I was getting an itch to buy a new Flex book and this was one of the titles that turned up in my searches.  It received fairly high reviews at Amazon, but I was unimpressed with it when I browsed the contents for an hour at B&N.  I remember having a “been there, seen that” kind of feeling at the time—the result being that I decided against it at the time.

It happened this spring that I found myself starting an internship at Nike, and that I would be mostly working with Flex (UI) and ColdFusion (backend).  My ColdFusion experience is next to zero, in fact if you don’t count the simple change I made to a simple hit counter I made back when it was still Allaire ColdFusion—my experience IS zero.  I started looking into expanding my ColdFusion library, specifically as it relates to Flex, and my searches lead me once again to Flex Solutions.  For whatever reason, I decided in favor of this book, and I’ve been regretting it ever since.

Sadly the only ColdFusion covered in the book was the bare basics.  If that’s all there is to working with Flex and ColdFusion, and nothing more, then I’ve got it made this summer.  My job should be a piece of cake.  I don’t fault the book too much on this point, after all it’s not a ColdFusion book.  In my defense, ColdFusion is mentioned 3 times in the product description on Amazon, as in “How to use the ColdFusion Extensions for Flex Builder,” under the What You’ll Learn heading.  Sadly you’ll only learn how to install the extensions, you might gain a vague understanding of what they are.  With regards to how to use them, Casario provides this instruction:

You can learn more about the ColdFusion extensions for Adobe Flex Builder in the video tutorials at the following site: www.adobe.com/devnet/coldfusion/articles/wizards.html.”

The article is dated August 28, 2006;  I haven’t watched it but I can only guess that it will be more helpful than Flex Solutions.

This book falls into the same category as most of the other Flex books I’ve read, and that is the “jack of all trades” category.  That’s probably a great thing if you need to sell books, but if you’ve been working with Flex for over a year and are looking for a book to guide you to the next level, it’s a bad thing.  It’s as though the publishers can’t resist adding those one or two chapters with an introduction to Flex in them, as if leaving out those 50-100 pages would make the book less valuable a resource.  I expect to find that in a book titled Flex for Beginners/Dummies or An Introduction to Flex, but not in a book that aims to be a cookbook.

I would like to say two things in Casario’s defense with regards to that matter.  First, is that it’s not even remotely as bad as those Deitel & Deitel ‘XXX How to Program’ books, where the first 5000 pages explain what a computer is and how to use the world wide web.  Second, he does add an Expert Tips subsection to each recipe.  None of them are that profound, but I wish the publisher could have extracted all those out and offered it as a pocket book or something.

The conclusion is that I would actually recommend this book to someone who’s a little less experienced with Flex.  If you’ve gone through Adobe’s tutorials and you need a few tips to help you finish your “big” application,  I could see the contents of this book being very helpful.  If you’d already consider yourself an advanced Flex developer, you’ll probably end up thinking this book is a waste of money.  Next time I’ll go with my instincts.

Now for a bit more criticism of Flex books in general.  Perhaps I’m too demanding.  I think I may have purchased Programming Flex 2 (Kazoun & Lott) with perfect timing.  I was at the perfect position along my Flex learning curve, the book had all the information I needed and at the right level, and I loved the book.  So much in fact, that I’ve often considered buying the Flex 3 edition even though I know I probably won’t find much new material in it.  I still refer to it often.

I absolutely refuse to accept that I know everything there is to know about Flex and/or Actionscript, but Flex Solutions and most other books I’ve read on the topic have given me very little under the category of “things I don’t know yet”.  I skipped directly to sections with topics I wasn’t as familiar with, but found only the same information I had already seen or heard.  Perhaps when I’ve had time to go through the book more thoroughly my opinion may have changed.

In the meantime, would someone PLEASE write an ADVANCED book about Flex?  Or is that even possible?  Is Flex just one of those things where a book can only take you so far, and you have to find the road to mastery on your own?  I’d write it myself if I considered myself qualified, or if I felt inclined to spend my time writing a book.  I’d undoubtedly hate it too, for reasons I stated above.  Anyway, I’m expecting a copy of the Flex 3 Cookbook soon, which I’ve been anticipating for a while now.  I just hope it doesn’t let me down.