Sometime after MAX ’08 I decided to get Juan Sanchez’s flex book, Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0. Juan’s background is in User Experience Design (UXD), so it was refreshing to get a flex book with some UXD perspective for a change – so many of the flex community are ex-Java guys, and no offense guys (some of our best Flex developers came from the Java world), but the Java perspective can get a bit, ahem, dry after a while. As far as the content of the book goes, Appendix A, Skinning and Styling Diagrams, by itself is valuable enough to make this book a must-have reference on any flex developer’s bookshelf. Juan mentioned somewhere (his blog?) that a lot of folks were requesting posters to be made of these diagrams and that he was in fact planning to make these available. (What I want to know is, can I get mine framed?)

The level and approach of this book is the epitome of what a lot of us wish the Flex docs from Adobe would be closer to. Having this book about thirty projects ago would really have made our lives easier in quite a few places. Then again, when has there ever been a comprehensive resource for an alpha product? That’s where we found ourselves when we made the transition from developing RIA’s in Flash to developing them in Flex. According to the team handling the Adobe documentation for Flex, they have been short-handed, and understandably so as flex developers are still in incredible demand yet very short supply. At least, that’s what they told me in ’07; I have to wonder what the status of the situation is after the massive layoffs by Adobe in between MAX events. Regardless, even after having to learn a lot of these things the hard way in Flex, there was still quite a lot of good information in this book even for advanced developers. Animation, easing, skinning – just a few of the topics that are covered in depth.

Juan and Andy also took care to include lots of colorful images in their book, which they make heavy reference and use of. Ahem. The book is printed in BLACK AND WHITE. Not a drop of color anwhere, except for some sickening purple tint on the front cover. Almost every chapter, I found myself grimacing as the authors write, for example, “…in this case, red projects a negative relation…”. Red? Where? It seemed like they had no clue from the publisher that their book was going to be published in B&W, and, after asking Juan about it over Twitter, that was indeed confirmed – they only found out at the last minute. Oh, sure, they offer a free TRIAL subscription to the book on Safari when you buy the hard copy, and supposedly in the e-version on Safari the images are in color. If I wanted to read it online, I wouldn’t have bought the hard copy! I’ve done the Safari trial run before when I got a year subscription for purchasing Komodo for my perl development needs. Honestly the model of paying continuous rent for my books, especially in this case where I’ve already paid for the book in full, just doesn’t jive with me.

At the end of the day, the content of the book makes it a worthwhile buy, despite my feelings of being ripped off by the publisher. But this kind of experience definitely gives good argument for self publishing. I bought the book because of who the authors were – I would have still bought it, at the same price or even more, had they self-published….
With all the media coverage on the downfall of the newspaper industry, and the publishing industry in general, I feel companies like Blurb are well positioned while companies like Addison Wesley are doomed to failure as long as their only concern seems to be maximizing their profit margin whilst ignoring the needs of their consumers.

update: According to sources at Adobe, they’ve been having issues with the MXNA feed aggregator not automatically updating feeds. This update is a test to see if updating the blog entry is enough to force an update to MXNA using the ping URL mechanism…
And, apparently using the ping URL works.