Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0 is out!
Fellow coworkers Juan Sanchez and Andy McIntosh are official authors and have a really great book about the creative side of Flex development and design.
Published under Addison Wesley, this book provides a huge amount of information which is not only helpful to developers, but very well structured and written for designers to begin diving into a little Flex.
Even if you have absolutely no developmental experience, this book covers a lot of general design and visual UI methodologies & techniques for making that Flex application not only look great, but provide a great experience as well. We all know that even if an application looks awesome, it doesn’t necessarily mean the experience or work flow is on point.
The code samples are very easy to follow and complete, even for a novice. It can get very technical in some areas, but the way the information is provided in a clear and concise manner, makes it easy to follow along and get into. Based on the title, it is about visual experiences, and the book itself is also very visual with excellent diagrams, screenshots and attractive examples.
This is targeted for Flex 3.0, and even though Flex 4.0 is right around the corner, I can say that there is still a lot of stuff in this book which will continue to hold and be applied. I have dove into the new Flex 4.0 (gumbo) components and worked on styling/skinning of them, and even though they use a new technique with FXG, there are still many components that are not converted yet and will still use the various technique this book covers.
Another great part of this book, is that since Flex is similar to other development platforms, so are some of its visual aspects. You can explore and apply the concepts in this book towards general UI design and experience for a variety of platforms, although it does take a deeper dive into Flex 3.0.
Of course it sounds biased for me to support this book, but I am being honest when I say that this is a great book for a designer to either begin or advance their skills with the visual experience of Flex design/development. I have been working with this side of the process for about 2 years, and I still learned a lot from this book!
I’d also like to add that developers of all levels would benefit from this book too, even if you’re not very visual or have a sense for great design.
Adobe’s very own Narcisco Jaramillo contributed a great foreword also!