The book is organized in five sections as follows.

Your first Information Rich Application

In this section you will learn to build your first Flex application. You will discover that MXML is a great markup language to quickly create a working application. The application will load data from RSS and will display info accordingly. To get to this result we need some theory about the Flex framework and to get acquainted with the Flash Builder IDE. You ready?

Building User Interaction

Learning events and components behavior is essential to build and deploy effective Rich Internet Applications in Flex . In this section we will have a more detailed look at components and the way we can use them in our projects. After an introduction to events, key elements in Flex applications, we will learn how to use and containers and states. We will see a full example of how to implement a login panel which provides feedback according to the response on the server side. We will also illustrate how to use validators and to use the debugger.

Charting and Multimedia

In this section we will explore two more tools for data-driven applications: charts and audio/video. In the first part we will describe the main components of the chart library included in Flash Builder and we will see how to build and customize widely used charts. In the second part we will focus on the multimedia capabilities of the Flash Builder, by illustrating how to manipulate video and audio files.

Building Air Applications with Flash Builder

In this section we will describe what is an Air application and which are the differences with respect to Flex applications. We will describe how to set up an Adobe Air project and we will explain the different ways to package an application for distribution. We will also highlight the capabilities of the Adobe Air framework like: reading and writing files, interacting with local databases, detect and manipulate storage devices connected to the computer.

Customizing the UI

In this section we will describe how to modify the appearance of our flex applications. First we need some theoretical knowledge to get acquainted with terms like theme, skin, style. We will describe the difference between families of components (from the flex3 and flex4 library) and the ways of changing instances or classes of elements. Then we will dig deeper into the process of skinning by using Flash Builder and other tools of the Adobe suite like Illustrator and Catalyst.
We will briefly describe how to skin components of the flex3 library and then we will conclude by illustrating transitions and the application of skins at run-time.