In our December Meeting we gave out a few books from Manning for some members of the community to review. Below is the first of these, a review of Adobe Air in Action by Darryl Ho. If you’re interested in reviewing an Adobe related book for us that’s put out by one of the major publishers, just contact us (using the contact us page) and we’ll see what we can do to get you a copy of the book!.

Pros:
An excellent introduction to Adobe AIR for Flex and Flash developers. Covers building AIR 1.0 applications using Flex Builder 3, Flash CS3 and the Flex SDK commands. This book assumes that you have had some experience programming with Flex/AS3 but the examples and sample code are explained in such great detail that it is not absolutely necessary.
I am a huge fan of the step by step format used to explain the sample code.

Cons:
The SQLTutorial AIR application file from Chapter 5 is missing from the website however the chapter has enough details to allow the reader to develop the application as an exercise. The only other draw back found was not the fault of the authors; the YouTube application code has to be updated because the YouTubeAPI changed, however Joseph Lott quickly provided a solution located on the Manning Author Online Forum (http://www.manning-sandbox.com/forum.jspa?forumID=370).

Additional Comments:
This book is an easy read and has easy to follow code samples. I would highly recommend this book to anyone starting out in AIR development.

Star Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars