Good Flex book for long time developers

Question

Many Flex books seem to focus on people new to programming. E.g. I bought the book Learning Flex 3 from Adobe Developer Library, which IMO contained to much noise, like explaining basic programming concepts etc.

Is there a good book that don't take the 'new to programming' approach? I have been a developer for 10 years, and used languages like JavaScript, Java, Groovy, Ruby, C, PHP, Objective-C etc.
What I need most is to be familiar with the components and API.

Also, it would be nice if the book doesn't focus on using Flex Builder / Flash Builder. (I use IntelliJ IDEA)

Answer 1

I found this book to be really good, and like you, I'm no beginner, and wanted something for developers, and not for people totally new to it.

This book was just that.

Cheers

Answer 2

I thought that the Flexible Rails book was by far the most practical and detailed book out there. Even if you don't know Ruby (you do though), this book is awesome. You build a useful app for Flex and AIR, use Cairngorm (Adobe's supported Flex Application Framework, but people seem to enjoy using others like Mate and Swiz), connect to a backend with XML, JSON, and AMF, and build useful CMS-like interfaces, all using design patterns.

Then the Actionscript 3 Cookbook is my next favorite.

But if there's one book you should get, get Flexible Rails. I've browsed/read through most of the Flex Books at one point or another, and they're all either too fundamental, or just serve as references for cool tricks.

They came out with a new book Hello Flex 4, but I haven't checked it out. And the culmination of Flexible Rails is Pomodo on Rails and RestfulX, both of which are open source on Github, and actively developed. It doesn't get better than that in my opinion.

Best, Lance

Answer 3

Programming Flex 3

Explains very well all you need to know about the Flex SDK.