Flex Learning Paths Beta

Question

Here's a few initial thoughts.
First off, your intention is commendable. I'm very pleased to
see what I'd almost describe as a professional development tool
encapsulating what Adobe believes as the quickest path to Flex
mastery. It's clean, well thought out and a nice aggregate of
materials relating to learning Flex. I appreciate the filters of
Architect/Programmer/Manager and the sub-filters of Data Driven /
Customizing etc.
I am committed to getting a thorough understanding of Flex
and at a glance - this looks perfect. Of course, I consider this a
supplement to the mountain of books and tutes I've already
assembled.
Finally, feedback. I want this as an AIR app - on my desktop,
slightly repurposed as a "To DO" list. I want to be able to check
off items as I complete them and I want to have the capability to
add minor notes of my own to each task. The ability to add links to
additional resources found online that relate to the task/subject
matter would also be beneficial.
Again, looks to be an very helpful tool with an ambitious
agenda. I'm sure I'll have more to say as I move through it.
Thanks
Side Note: Videos are playing fine on my end

Answer 1

i would say it depends on which adobe products you learned to
tell how well it will translate. if you know flash/actionscript, it
should not be too bad. javascript and actionscript are both in the
ECMAScript families, so if you've not seen actionscript, but you
know javascript, it will be familiar.
also, it depends on how complex the project is. i came from
java-land (10+ years) and it's been a bit of an uphill climb
because our project is fairly complex. we have a real time system
in java to which we're connecting a flex client thru a proprietary
binary protocol polling every few seconds. we use the data grid
heavily and rely on some other key components, and we've had to
customize or override almost every behavior of TileList, DataGrid,
and ArrayCollection. we've had to disable a lot of the binding
features on the collection under the grid because we're updating
about 300 cells at a time.
of course, if you want to do a shopping cart (*the* flex
example application), you will actually find about 30 gazillion
implementations. that's a fairly static application with few
tentacles to server-side services. most examples online are pretty
trivial and i've not found a lot of use for them.
if your project is not too complex and you have some
object-oriented programming ability, it's not too bad a curve.
./paul