Author: Tony Hillerson & Daniel Wanja
Publisher: Addison Wesley, 2009
Pages: 360
ISBN: 978-0321543370
Aimed at: Web developers using Abode Flex  and Rails
Rating: 4.5
Pros: A useful cookbook for using Flex 3.0 with Rails 2.0
Cons: Odd combination of sever-side and client-side concerns
Reviewed by: David Conrad

The subtitle of this book is "Building Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex 3.0 and Rails 2.0"

A book on Flex and Rails is a little odd in that Flex is the client side and Rails the server side. So in principle there should be nothing much to say about any special interactions between them. The whole ideas is that Rails is a server that can working with almost any client and Flex is a client that can work with almost any server. In other words you should be able to buy a book on Flex, learn all about it, buy a book on Rails, learn all about it - and making them work together involves no new information.

If you would prefer to have a single book, telling you alternately about Rails and Flex, then you might be interested in this book. It starts off by explaining how to get Rails and Flex working - it's just a sketchy outline but it is enough to get you going. The next topic is passing XML between Rails and Flex. Then we move on to a more complete example of a stock portfolio. Then on to testing with Flunit, passing data with AMF, debugging, Flex MVC and performance and optimistation.

The second part of the book is a cookbook of topics dealing with source control, Rake, deploying flex and rails, authenticating, hierarchical data with RubyAMF, DtagGrid, runtime configuration using Prana, server push using Juggernaut and Flex/Javascript communication. If you need a book of examples of using Rails and Flex together this is does the job.