Hi All, FYI, I just got back from Fig Leaf's 3-day "Developing Rich Client Applications" Flex course. Overall, I found it very beneficial. The most valuable part was the instructor's willingness to answer specific questions off-line, including Flex coding topics that were outside the scope of the immediate material (which in itself is a decent first-level cookbook).
To that end, I think the best thing I did was to self-train for several weeks beforehand with Adobe's free "Getting Started with Flex 2" guide, and I also took a stab at writing the first version of my app. That way I didn't waste my class time with novice-level, 101-type questions - I was able to get time-saving answers to real problems instead. In hindsight, the following were the best "starting with Flex" resources for me (and what I'll recommend to my co-workers), in rough logical order of use: - the 'intro to flex for java developers' online presentation by Bruce Eckel - the 'getting started with flex 2' guide (did all the excercises; pretty quick read) - the 'flex 2 developer's guide' - this forum - the flex 2 language reference at livedocs - the 3-day flex course In addition, the most persuasive resources that convinced me to go with Flex (as opposed to Ajax, primarily) were: - Bruce Eckel's article on the evolution of RIAs at http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/333329.htm - The Component Explorer example at http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/explorer/explorer.html - The Dashboard charting example at http://examples.adobe.com/flex2/inproduct/sdk/dashboard/dashboard.html Also, I thought the Conerates java test-drive was an appealing example for its simplicity, if you happen to come from a Java/Tomcat background: http://coenraets.org/blog/2007/01/flex-test-drive-server-for-java-developers-tomcat-based/ And while it covers a lot of the same info from the devleoper's guide and the fig leaf class workbook, I've also found Adobe's "training from the source" book to be useful. Curious to see if O'Reily's to-be-published 'Flex2 Cookbook' will cover any new ground... -Peter Demling Lexington, MA
