FlashDevelop - training materials, tutorials, books (Flex/Flash development without FlexBuilder)

Question

Hi, I want to start Flash/Flex/ActionScript development and got lost with the technologies, documentation and tools available. Searches pointed me to Adobe FlexBuilder and Adobe Flash (Designer, CS3, CS4).

Then, I found FlashDevelop, learned that Flex SDK and compilers are free. Also, you can make a complete Flash application in FlashDevelop (using "FLA dummy" method).

Question - what traning materials I should start from to understand how to develop Flash applications using FlashDevelop?

I look for training materials, guides, tutorials, screencast, books (amazon kindle) for beginners in Flash using free tools (either FlashDevelop or TextEditor + compiler), but not for beginners in programming (know few languages already).

Answer 1

A lot of help can be found on their wiki - FlashDevelop wiki

If you want to start developing in Flex (which might be a really nice idea if you're coming from desktop development) FlashDevelop will work, but I would suggest to use Flex Builder first, as a lot of examples you will find on the web are built using that, and it's really very straight forward, as it's aimed ad Flex. If you're a student you can get a free license from Adobe here, if you're not than there is a 30 day free trial.

Answer 2

Just to add one more technology (and option) to the pot, you might want to look into haXe. It is a language (that FlashDevelop natively supports) which can compile to several platforms, including SWFs (both AVM1 and AVM2) that run in Flash Player. If you use Flash as your target platform for your haXe program, you get full access to the Flash API (not sure about Flex, though).

Answer 3

I've been learning Flex using Flashdevelop and working from Adobe Flex 3: Training from the source (which is a great book). I've blogged my notes on the lessons and what I had to do to get some things to work using Flashdevelop rather than Flex Builder.

Posts with specific Flashdevelop info (from setting it up to creating css swfs, modules,rsl etc) are tagged with Flashdevelop: http://mattreyuk.wordpress.com/tag/flashdevelop/