specializing in digital media technologies

Welcome to the companion Web site for the book Effortless Flex 4 Development. The book is written by Larry Ullman and was published by New Riders in July 2010. And now, the marketing!

Server-side developers learn how to leverage Flex 4 to provide a rich client-side experience using Effortless Flex 4 Development

First the Web was all static content (HTML). Then, as more was expected of sites, server-side technologies like PHP became necessary. But now Rich Internet Applications (RIA) put a lot of the functionality back in the Web browser, so a server-side technology alone will no longer suffice. Developers who have been doing server-side work for years need to broaden their horizons to provide a rich client-side experience. Enter Effortless Flex 4 Development by bestselling author Larry Ullman.

Flash-Flex is a powerful duo for providing a rich, client-side experience. The first third of this book covers the fundamentals of creating Flex apps. The second third is about getting, displaying, validating, and sending data: locally, remotely, and from the user. All server-side code in this book is PHP, and this data-centric view and larger support for PHP is a key focus in Flex 4. This second part of the book distinguishes it from the Adobe Press title Flex Training from the Source and other existing titles. The last third is about rounding out the know-how for full application development.

Taking advantage of what Flex 4 has to offer, developers can quickly learn how to create RIAs, some of which interact with PHP scripts running on the server. Adobe has open-sourced Flex and made its SDK freely available, so it is becoming more attractive to developers who prefer open-source projects over commercial ones. Flex is geared towards developers (whereas Flash is for designers, and Flash Catalyst is in between). The book will use Flash Builder (but not Flash or Flash Catalyst), and it will also talk about non-Adobe ways to develop. Since the author is writing this book as a developer/programmer for other developers/programmers (as opposed to a designers), there is a predominance of how-tos and real-world practices.

Audience

The author is writing this book as a developer/programmer for other developers/programmers (as opposed to a designers). The readers would include any of the following: those already using a server-side technology like PHP; those already doing Rich Internet Applications using JavaScript/Ajax; those already using Flex 3 or earlier; and those who don't fit in the other categories but are curious about Flex.

Author Bio

Larry Ullman is the president of Digital Media and Communications, Inc., a firm specializing in information technology. He is the author of several bestselling scripting and programming books, including PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide. Larry also writes articles on these subjects and teaches them in small and large group settings. Despite working with computers, programming languages, databases, and such since the early 1980s, Larry still claims he’s not a computer geek (but he admits he can speak their language).

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