Learning Flex 4 by Alaric Cole and Elijah Robison

If you have read the earlier book, "Learning Flex 3 by Alaric Cole", you pretty much have an idea of the quality of work. This book lives up to that name and offers some delightful upgrades.

For a beginner, the world of Flex is very daunting and confusing. If you want a perfect book that assumes very little about your Flex background, this book lays the foundation for you to grow into a great Flex developer.

After you have been through the first 17 chapters and have mastered the contents, naturally the question arises as to where to go from here. Chapter 18 addresses exactly that. I was delighted to read quite a few new things like the "AlivePDF" library for generating client-side PDF files, the Facebook API, Google Map integration, etc.

The only drawback I found is perhaps a lack of mention on how to integrate Flex with a Java backend but there are plenty of online resources and O'Reilly books to help with that.

Software Engineering Today

Software engineering today is probably a ton of a magnitude complex than it was 4 decades ago. We've come a long way in terms of capabilities for sure but the complexity to deliver those capabilities has just shot up tremendously. Gone are the days when we could get by just knowing C/C++ as on OO developer. Yeseterday we had to know Java, Spring, Hibernate, Aspect Oriented, SOAP/REST, SAP/Oracle, AJAX, Maven, JUnit, DBUnit, Agile development, etc. Today, in addition to what we knew yesterday, we also have to know Flex, Andriod, iPhone/iPad, JQuery, MongoDB, Hadoop, etc, etc. The list just keeps growing.

This blog is dedicated to the technologies of today and tomorrow and the resources (books, links) that support the learning. I am a big fan of O'Reilly, Manning, and Wiley publishers. Hopefully this blog will simplify your learning of these technologies.