Subject of the Book
The book is aimed squarely at the IT developers. It is not a replacement of documentation that ships with Flex. It is expected that you would use online help/references for detailed review if the methods and properties. Instead, this book is a practical course that takes you into the world of real-life RIA applications. We also provided open source components and libraries that we hope will help you in your own development.

The Part 1 sets the stage with the basic concepts of RIA by explaining the architecture and providing introduction into Flex 2 development concepts. We explore similarities and differences between HTML/AJAX solutions and Flex, provide definitions of the basic parts of the language and environment. The main focus of this section is on giving practical cases for different aspects of the platform

In Part 2 is specially crafted for Java developers that need to grasp similarities and differences of RIA and JEE environments. We start with illustrating the common tasks and similarities of the environments. From there we transit to the new tasks that are specific for rich client and provide tools for “thin server” solution. Finally, we describe the automation tools to provide rapid application development environment for database applications by generating matching server and client code.

Part 3 is devoted to customization layer of the Flex. Depending on the type of the application you can benefit by usage of higher levels of abstraction of application-specific tasks via custom controls and frameworks. In this part we describe how to make better controls,  deal with asynchronous nature of communications, generalize error handling and other basic application framework tasks needed for robust applications. Next, we take on the subject of dynamic interfaces by introducing toolkit to customize DataGrids UI in run-time. Finally, we introduce reporting solution based on the new features of Flex 2.

Part 4 concentrates on Flex Enterprise Services. Here we would concentrate on the tasks common for enterprise developers and provide examples on using Flex with workflow, messaging and data services existing in the current environments.