specializing in digital media technologies

I am very pleased to announce that my latest book, “Effortless Flex 4 Development”, came out today. Well, kind of. I received my copies today, which means that the book does exist in physical format, although it may be a couple/few days before it’s on bookshelves. Amazon has it listed as being available on July 5, 2010 and currently sells it for $29.69 (the MSRP is $44.99). I will also be giving away a few copies to people subscribed to my newsletter.

As always, my thanks to those interested in my work!

Peachpit Press, publisher of my forthcoming “Effortless Flex 4 Development” book, has published another excerpt of the book online, free for anyone to read. (Technically New Riders is the publisher, but New Riders is owned by Peachpit.) This article represents a few pages from Chapter 4 of the book, “Event Management”. It follows the previous excerpt (also from Chapter 4), which you should probably read first if you haven’t. The first excerpt largely discusses event handling theory; in this excerpt you’ll see how to turn that theory into actual code. Even if you don’t yet know Flex and ActionScript, you should still be able to follow along. Most importantly, Flex is largely an event-driven approach to application development (conversely, Flash Professional is primarily a timeline-driven approach), so this section is really a key insight into what it’s like to use Flex.

I’m just about to do two “5 Tips in 5 Days” blog posts for Peachpit’s site. One will be specifically on the Flex 4 framework and the other will be on Flash Builder. Flash Builder, in case you’re not familiar with it, used to be called Flex Builder and is just a commercial IDE for developing using Flex. You don’t have to use Flash Builder as the Flex 4 framework and its SDK are available for free, but it does ease the process significantly. The book does not assume you’re using Flash Builder, either. There are specific instructions for how to create Flex applications using a text editor and the command-line IDE, but there are also areas that cover how you would do X or Y using Flash Builder. Most of the book focuses on the Flex framework, so it doesn’t matter what development tools you’re using.

I’m pleased to say that the first draft of my latest book, “Effortless Flex 4 Development”, is now complete. In fact, I’ve already done the rewrites on half the book and should complete those this week. The final table of contents is below. The table lists all of the top level sections, but doesn’t reflect specifics covered in subsections or addressed in sidebars. There are a couple of minor topics that I wanted to get in there if there was room, such as effects, and I’ll write those up in this blog instead. (continue reading…)