GREAT READ!

Adobe AIR In Action, by Jospeh Lott, Kathryn Rotondo, Samuel Ahn, and Ashley Atkins, is a great resource for those starting to learn the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). This book takes you from the absolute essentials, step-by-step with thoughtful screenshots to light your path to creating great AIR applications.

I was really impressed that the authors take you through everything you need or want to know in order to get up and running. For example, I have often avoided making a lot of configuration changes to the AIR app.xml file just because I did not have time to scurry around finding clear concise explanations of what effects my actions would have. Lott, et al. break it down thoroughly and completely in a section that took me about 5 minutes to fully understand all of the various settings of the config.xml file.

I am a visual learner and, in the past, spent hours looking at framework documentation ASDOCS only to realize that I didn't learn nearly what my time investment would have supported. I can say that the style of this book is very conducive to retention without "talking down" to the reader.

Coming from a Flex background, I enjoyed the many examples provided in Flex, but was especially interested in the step-by-step examples provided for people coming from a Flash CS3 background. As with all of the examples in the book, Adobe AIR In Action not only provides you with the "how" to do something, but background information on the "why" you do something (should you be interested in knowing the "why" that is).

There is an entire chapter devoted just to integrating your AIR application into your SQL database. The chapter is quite thorough, yet explained clearly and effectively.

My only criticism, if any, would have to be that I would have liked a little more in the way of network, and web service integration. Since the majority of AIR applications are distributed applications that call back to some form of data storage, I would have enjoyed a little more depth in different approaches of asynchronous server communication with your AIR application. However, the book does cover network monitoring for both HTTP and sockets.

I'm not trying to sell you anything. But I will say, that this is one of the better beginner level books I've read. Is it going to answer ALL of your questions? No. But it will give you a great head-start and sound foundational working knowledge of Adobe AIR.

 you can find the book on Amazon here.