Creating Mashups with Adobe Flex and AIR (Friends of Ed Abobe Learning Library) [ペーパーバック]

This book starts out ok but after the first example, it goes downhill fast. Even while working on the first example, they constantly tell you to read the api's and never go into it beyond a superficial level.

Even the writing is pretty boring which makes this very hard to read...

After few weeks of thinking, I decided to write my thoughts about this book. In the beginning this book made a quiet an impression but later this feeling started fading away and on the end I had pretty good pros and cons for considering giving this book a recommendation.

What happened and where this book succesed and failed?

The main topic of this book is connecting your Flex/AIR application with existing web services which you probably use almost every day/week. An introduction of this book is pretty common for all the books about Flex (except Flex cookbooks and Flex books for absolute beginners). If you have some experience with Flex, starting chapters could be boring and if you just started learning Flex, these chapters could help you but you'll need aditional information. If you have a decent history in web programming you could handle these chapters well.

After opening chapters comes an interesting part of the book in which you will learn how to create a fully functional and useful applications for handling Flickr and Technorati web services. I know, a lot of books cover these topics but examples in this book are really good and useful. From my experience, they are better than examples in some other books.

Chapter 6 made an excellent impression and I would recommend this chapter to any decent Flex developer. This chapter talks about performance management in Flex application. I'm sure you can find these information if you combine several web resources but here you can find trully excellent advice how to help your application to reduce memory and processor costs.
When you're done reading about peformance management, you'll get more information about debugging and creating debugging log. Again, really good topic.

Then book goes back again to connecting Flex to web services such as Last.fm and Amazon Web services. These topics can be really useful.

After these chapters the book lost it's enthusiasm. Chapters about AIR are too short there are not enough pages to discuss about web applications on your desktop. I had a feeling that book was finished too soon. Last several chapters are not so detailed and if you want to create decent AIR applications, you need more material.

This book has it's glorious moments but at the end of reading it, these moments already faded away. Like I said, it has an excellent chapters about performance management, logging and debugging, has some cool examples for Flickr but there are so many pages that could have been used in a better way. If you are not convinced to buy this book, consider buying it with your colleague to share the costs because I think you need to read this chapter about performance management. I believe these 20-30$ will look pretty cheap if this chapter could help you to become a really good Flex developer.

A small book with many chapters dedicated to what Flex does and doesn't. It's only after several chapters that the authors enter into the stuff suggested by the title. Said differently, for the newbie to Flex a way to fast introduction to it, for the Flex user a lot of useless content. I would strongly recommend NOT to buy this book.