Customer Reviews
A great book, well structured and written & thoroughly recommended. - By: R. Stocks, 18 Sep 2008 
If, like me, you like the idea of leveraging the Flash/Flex technology for desktop applications & you've had a look through the Adobe online training resources but don't have a clear picture in your mind of how you would go about building a full scale application then this is the book for you. It walks you through the process of creating an online grocery store introducing the various concepts to you in a controlled & well thought through sequence. You will find yourself rewriting code as you go but this serves as an excellent way to highlight some poor practices whilst demonstrating best practice techniques. You will find that you gain in confidence as you work through the chapters needing less & less spoon feeding until you gain enough confidence to make some improvements of your own here & there. By the end, you will be eager & ready to start building your own applications.
There are a handful of mistakes in the book but none of them cause any major difficulties (apart from step 7 on page 580 of chapter 23 which should refer to the file named PrintingTask1.mxml not SortingADG.mxml - well we alll make copy-and-paste errors). The accompanying disk provides before & after code for each lesson which is great if you run into difficulties or wish to skip chapters (which I would not recommend).
Great Book - By: Krzysztof Satola, 18 Jul 2008 Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source is an update to the extremely popular Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source. Authors of the book not only revised the earlier version of the book but also added a few chapters on features such modules, the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), & the advanced DataGrid component.
If you are new to Flex 3, this book will guide you through the process of developing a complete application (an online grocery store) using Adobe Flex Builder 3. This book provides you with alll the tools you need to get started. But be aware that to make the most of this book, you should at the very least understand basic web terminology. This book is written assuming that you are comfortable working with other programming languages such as Java, .Net, PHP or ColdFusion. This knowledge let you better understand many comparisons & analogies made to server-side web programming.
If you are more advanced Flex developer you can still find this book compelling. You will especiallly like to focus on new Flex 3 topics which are discussed in this book. There are many places inside "old chapters" which were updated or extended to reflect changes & improvements available in Adobe Flex 3.
I am a Flex Developer. Although I have read the Adobe Flex 2: Training from the Source book I have also read Adobe Flex 3 version of the book & I do not regret it. It has been worth spending my time on reading. I especiallly liked new parts on creating modular applications & profiling Flex applications.
If you learn best by doing, this is the book you need. I definitely recommend this book.
Better books on the market - By: Lister, 05 May 2008 
The main theme of this book is building an interactive shopping cart using flex, each chapter is made up of a series of steps, ie step 1: type this, this does that; step2: type that, that does this; right up until step 20, then start again, & this continues alll through the book. So it got very boring quickly, I found myself just following orders & reading the descriptions between the lines, not great for learning.
I prefer the either write 10 or 20 lines of code, then read a description about the code I've written, or read description then write code, not write 2 lines of code, read description, write another 2 lines, read description it gets old & mind numbing fast. Worse still each chapter uses files from the previous chapter, so if you jump to a future chapter you need the previous chapers files to follow the steps, just adds to clutter & other books have a much better formula.
This book is not bad, it's more like an exercise text book, it's just there are far better books on the market. I recommend the FriendsofEd series of flex3 books.
