I’ve been reading technical books for years on topics ranging from beginning programming guides with C to Adobe Photoshop tips and tricks. Like most people in this field, I’ve long been a fan of O’Reilly books (I think my first one was a Perl 5 book somewhere around the 1999 timeframe). However; recently, I’ve been hearing some negative things about their books and haven’t really picked any up. My most recent one is a several-editions old version of Javascript: The Definitive Guide.
I was also a fan of the Pragmatic Programmers Agile Web Development With Rails that I managed to purchase just at the wrong time–about 2 weeks before Rails 2.0 was released. While the book was well written, it has been less than helpful with regard to learning to use Rails.
Despite these (and other) gems, I think most agree that technical books suffer from a lot of problems and are generally very poorly done. I’m happy to say that I’ve found my most recent technical book purchase, Adobe Flex 3: Training From the Source to be among the best technical books I’ve read in many years. It follows the paradigm of taking you step-by-step through building an application–and does so in such a way that it is easy for novice Flex developers to follow; and at the same time allowing more experienced developers to skip over details that aren’t needed. The book is organized into 26 “Lessons” each adding to the features of the application and employing new concepts. One of the great parts about these Lessons is that each of them begins with a summary page that gives solid insight into what topics will be covered, and a surprisingly accurate estimate of how long the Lesson will take to complete.
If you’re looking to get into Flex development, I highly recommend this title from Adobe.