Flex Resources and Help

The best resources I found, in a variety of media:

Books

These were the top 3 books recommended over and over again by the Usenet groups I follow.

1. Programming Flex 3: The Comprehensive Guide to Creating Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex [link]
2. Essential ActionScript 3.0 [link]
3. Programming Flash Communication Server [link]

Web

Documentation

If you have a project already in mind and understand object oriented code, you may want to jump right in with your idea.

1. Flex 3 docs [html | pdf]
2. ActionScript 3 docs [html | pdf]
3. Flash Media Server 3 docs [html | pdf]
4. Flash Media Server 3.5 docs [html | pdf]

Video Tutorials

While Lynda.com has been a great resource for learning Flex, these free video tutorials have proven just as handy:

1. Learn Flex in a Week [video tutorials]
2. Flash 411: Getting your video questions answered [video tutorials]

Sample Apps

Sometimes the best way to learn a new concept is to just jump right in and get your hands dirty. These sample applications are small, simple and great examples of the potential behind RIAs. Although the first one is created in Flash, it can be done in Flex, too.

1. Building a Simple Live Video Broadcaster and Receiver [sample app]*
2. Creating a Simple RIA [sample app]

* As someone new to Flex, I thought the broadcaster/receiver idea would have been really useful as a sample Flex project, so I rebuilt this one in Flex and translated it from ActionScript 2 into ActionScript 3. I’ll make the .zip file available for download in the next post.

People

For those really complex questions that can’t be answered by a definition in the documentation or isn’t covered in the books, you can connect to a pool of professionals via e-mail:

1. Flex Coders
2. Flash Tiger
3. Flash Coders