Two Words, One Answer.
cairngorm
 Professional BlazeDS: Creating Rich Internet Applications with Flex and Java (Wrox Programmer to Programmer) $54.99 Coming to Flex from a Java world, I clearly see two groups of people working on enterprise RIA projects: 1. People who know Java and J2EE and are novices to Flex 2. People who know Flex with a little understanding of what's going on on the server side (i.e. J2EE) I'm interviewing lots of enterprise developers for various Flex/Java roles, and it seems to be a trend that most people do not understand internals of BlazeDS/LCDS. While you can definitely find bits and pieces of information on the subject by googling specific topics and going through the product documentation, this 300-page book is something that gives you the entire picture of Flex-BlazeDS-J2EE data flow. How many people know what's long polling and what why it's better than polling? How to configure channels and endpoints to use long polling with failover to polling? Can you push the data form the server to the client with BlazeDS? How can you modify and extend the communication layer of BlazeDS (front-end channels and server-side adapters)? What are the option of conneting BlazeDS with the ORM framework (Hibernate)? This book gives you an overview of all these subjects with pretty simple to follow code samples. One of the reviewers wrote that he was falling to sleep while reading this book. Sure, it's a lot more interesting reading about developing flashy UI gadgets. Give me yet another Flex video player and a photo album application! Unfortunately, there are boring areas in any Flex/Java enterprise application that can either turn your project either into a well performing stable RIA or put the server on its knees. If you are looking for a fundamental manuscript on BlazeDS, this is not the book you need. But if you are a busy professional/tech lead/PM who needs to quickly get the big picture and understand what his/her options are, this book will definitely help you.  Professional Cairngorm $59.99 Take advantage of Cairngorm, one of the leading Flex frameworks for building Rich Internet Applications (RIA) Cairngorm is a framework that encourages best practices for RIA development. It is the most popular and widely deployed Flex framework, yet very few books provide the depth and detail necessary to thoroughly understand and utilize it. This helpful resource fills that void by going beyond the basics of Cairngorm and showing you the details behind its design. Using a full-scale project throughout the book, the author shows you Cairngorm in a real-world situation. You'll examine the various parts of the framework and what those parts are designed to accomplish, plus you'll learn how to implement each of the individual parts to create a complete project. Offers hard-to-find coverage of Cairngorm, the popular framework used for RIA development Features a real-world case throughout the book to walk you through the process of using Cairngorm in a large-scale project Explains the details behind Cairngorm and how you can best take advantage of this framework With this resource, you'll get step-by-step guidance on how to best take advantage of all that Cairngorm has to offer.  Flex 3 in Action $49.99 I think this is a great book. I looked at it a few times in the bookstore before I decided to buy on Amazon. The book comes with an insert just inside the front cover. It reads "Get two ebooks for FREE! To get a free PDF copy of this book plus the ebook edition of Flex 4 in Action when it is released, purchase the print copy of this book and register it at the Manning website following the instructions inside this insert. That's it! Thanks from Manning!" Ebooks are handy. Who wouldn't want a free follow on book? So I went to Manning and had to enter codes from the table on the flip side of the advertisement. Having entered the codes I was surprised to find that I was not asked for my email address. Searching on Manning's website, I found this "We're sorry but the free ebook is only available with a paper book purchase from the Manning website." So buy this book happily from Amazon, but don't waste your time registering with Manning. |
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