Some Resources for Learning Adobe Flex
        William Mitchell
whm@MitchellSoftwareEngineering.com

Last update: Wed Oct 08 22:14:37 2008

Books
-----
When just starting up the Flex learning curve, I worked through a number of chapters
in "Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source" by Tapper et al., and found that to be very useful.

Another book that I used quite a bit when starting out was "Flex Solutions" by Casario.  It covers
a lot of material but it's very step-by-step, and while I once appreciated all the detail, it now
seems to have a lot of clutter.

"Programming Flex 2" by Kazoun and Lott is perhaps the Flex book I most regularly reference.  It does a
good job of concisely describing key points and in a number of places goes into depth I haven't found with
other Flex book.  The index is terrible--I usually thumb through the table of contents or search it on
Safari.  There's a new edition out, "Programming Flex 3", but I haven't upgraded my hardcopy yet.

"Flexible Rails" by Armstrong is about using Flex 3 with Ruby on Rails, but I think it's got enough good stuff
about Flex itself, and Flex-related web application architectural issues, to make it worthwhile, even if you
have no interest in Rails.

I've got an "early access" copy of "Flex 3 in Action" by Ahmed et al.  It has some rough spots, which are to
be expected, but I've found a fair amount of material in it that I've seen covered nowhere else.

"Developing Rich Clients with Macromedia Flex" by Webster and McLeod is a book based on an earlier
version of Flex, maybe 1.0, and ActionScript 2.0, but a lot of the material, especially the
conceptual stuff, is still as good as the day it was written, and the writers bring a lot of
real-world experience to the table.  Cairngorm seemed murky to me until I read "Flex Technical
Architecture" in chapter 20, which, interestingly, predates Cairngorm!  This book is truly a gem
that's slipping into the sands of time. 

Something I'd like to find but haven't is a Flex book that really goes deep.  There are dozens
of books on Flex that all cover roughly the same set of basics, some much better than others, but
I'd like a book that assumes the reader knows all the basics and starts there.  There are some places
of real depth in "Programming Flex 2", like the "Component Life Cycle" section, but I'd like to see a whole book
at that level.

It seems that there's one clear bookshelf-must for ActionScript 3.0, and that's "Essential ActionScript
3.0" by Moock.

Adobe Documentation
-------------------

Something I'd love but have never found is a full enumeration of all the Adobe documentation on
Flex.  One thing that seems to come pretty close is http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/flex3_documentation.zip--
a bunch of PDFs and "language reference" (API docs, I'd say) information as tree of HTML files.

Again and again I've found "Adobe Flex 3 Developer Guide", devguide_flex3.pdf, in that zip, to have
the best explanation of whatever I'm trying to understand.  IF I COULD CITE ONLY ONE RESOURCE FOR
FLEX, THIS PDF WOULD BE IT. 

Much of what's in that zip is available as HTML at http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/

FWIW, here's the correspondence between PDFs in the zip and sections below the above URL:

    devguide_flex3.pdf: 
        Flex Programming Elements, User Interfaces, Advanced Flex Programming, and 
        Data Access and Interconnectivity
    
    build_deploy_flex3.pdf: 
        Application Design, Application Development, Application Deployment
        
    createcomps_flex3.pdf: 
        Custom Component Development, MXML Custom Components, ActionScript Custom Components, 
        Nonvisual Custom Components
        
    datavis_flex3.pdf: Flex Data Visualization Developer's Guide
    
    using_fb_flex3.pdf: Using Flex Builder 3
    
    dev_guide_flex_air1.pdf: Developing AIR applications with Flex
    
    progAS_flex3.pdf: Programming ActionScript 3.0
    
    The content in compilerAPI_flex3.pdf, flash_component_kit_flex3.pdf,
    skinning_extensions_flex3.pdf, and testing_with_QTP_flex3.pdf doesn't seem to be present at
    the above URL (http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html).
    
I've found browsing the "Language Reference" at livedocs to be tedious and slow.  At the end of
this document is a script, flexref, that I use to search a local copy of the documentation by class
name or fragment thereof.

Here's an example of use: 

    % flexref array 
    1) ./Array.html 
    2) ./flash/utils/ByteArray.html 
    3) ./mx/collections/ArrayCollection.html 
    4) ./mx/core/ByteArrayAsset.html 
    5) ./mx/utils/ArrayUtil.html 
    #? 5    [Brings up ArrayUtil doc]

You'll have to hack on the script a little bit to make it work for you.

Communities
-----------

http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/ is pretty good, but it's about 100 messages per day,
most of the form "How can I make [something] work right?". 

The Adobe Flex forum,
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/webforums/forum/categories.cfm?forumid=60&catid=585&entercat=y is also
a read-only Google group:  http://groups.google.com/group/macromedia.flex.general_discussion/topics 

http://www.actionscript.org/forums/ has ActionScript 3.0 and Flex 2/3 forums, among others.

The #flex IRC channels on Freenode and EFNet are pretty good -- I've gotten quick, correct answers
for a number of questions there. 

The Flash and Flex communities have a common interest in ActionScript 3, so Flash groups are also a
source of AS3 expertise, albeit with lots of noise about Flash authoring, etc.  On Google there's
http://groups.google.com/group/macromedia.flash.actionscript/topics, also a read-only mirror of an
Adobe forum. 

http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders is a very active mailing list, but as the
name implies, it's Flash-, not Flex-centric.

I can't seem to find time to follow many blogs but a few I've made note of are these:

    http://blog.iconara.net/about/
    
    http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/ -- Alex Harui
    
    http://raghuonflex.wordpress.com -- Adobe Flex team member
    
    http://weblogs.macromedia.com/pmartin/
        Peter Martin, EMEA Consulting group, stuff on continuous integration and testing
    
    Issue 9907 of Flexcoders has a BIG list of blogs.

Tools and Libraries that I make regular use of
----------------------------------------------

FlexUnit -- http://code.google.com/p/as3flexunitlib
    xUnit for Flex, for TDD

Flex-Spy
    http://code.google.com/p/fxspy/
        "Flex-Spy allow you to inspect and dynamically change most properties and styles of the
        visual components in your Flex application.  You can - for example - try out a specific
        width or a background color for your component before changing it in your code."
                -- from the site
                
    Incredibly easy to drop in and use:
        (1) Add the .swc
        (2) Add an import: import com.flexspy.FlexSpy;
        (3) Stick in some way to fire it off.  I usually park a button somewhere:
                <mx:Button id="btnFlexSpy" label="FlexSpy" click="FlexSpy.show()" />

http://code.google.com/p/as3corelib -- ActionScript 3.0 library for several basic utilities.

FlashTracer
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3469

http://www.jeffryhouser.com/index.cfm/2007/12/4/Connecting-Flex-3-to-a-running-Debugger-session
    Describes how to attach Eclipse/Flex Builder and debug an already-running swf.

One loose end
-------------

I believe my path to enlightenment with Flex started with realizing that a file like x.mxml
that looks like this,

    <mx:TitleWindow xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
        ...
    </mx:TitleWindow>

is turned into ActionScript that looks like this: 'class x extends TitleWindow ...'.  The compiler flag
-keep-generated-actionscript, which causes the generated ActionScript files to be left in place, provides
the opportunity to understand the mapping from MXML to ActionScript.


Source for flexref script (mentioned above)
-------------------------
#!/bin/bash
#
# Note: I've unloaded http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/flex3_documentation.zip into
# cd /g/lib/books/adobe/CompleteFlex3Doc.  Adjust your paths accordingly.
#
# To regenerate: (cd /g/lib/books/adobe/CompleteFlex3Doc/langref; find -iname "*.html" | grep -v index > ../langref.files)
#
cd /g/lib/books/adobe/CompleteFlex3Doc/langref
if [ $# -ne 0 ]
then
    s=$1
else
    echo -n 'String to search for? '
    read s
fi
while true
do
    if hits=$(grep -i -e $s ../langref.files)
    then
        select page in $hits
        do
            if [ -z $page ]
            then
                break
            fi
            open $page  # With Cygwin, this is my open script: file=$(cygpath -w "$1"); cmd /c "$file" &
        done
        s=$REPLY
    else
        echo -n 'No matches.  String to search for? '
        read s
    fi
done