Igor Costa

One of the big problems I had in the past was developing kick ass components in actionscript format, where you see by proven simple basic component done for Google Maps.
Most of applications I did before was using only mxml format and this is straight forward way that 9 of 10 Flex developers does in usual ways.
I was doing pretty well, but for sure if you’re trying to get better and better as a developer you see that a long way to do and write stuffs like bytearray.org, mchambers, gskinner. Most of theses developers love and breath the development process, respecting the framework and the way they flow.

Six months ago I had this as goal, achieve a development senior level for custom components in actionscript format. The best way to do that was reading the Flex SDK source code, and see how I could learn from them. I must say you to not do that right now if you don’t have a big experience in Flex development, has a lot of way to go.

It’s hard enough to learn this path and get a level of that. The pursuit of happiness was very clear for me after three months of study and internal tests, samples. I personally don’t like read I most enjoy see in action examples of some framework then I read later the docs.

In fact was hard months, because I just got 3 or 2 hours a day to study. I needed as anyone needs to work and put grant the food for home. And some times I would think in give up and keep going doing mxml code and some little utility classes. But when everytime I saw a bug logged in the Flex bug base and example of work from those guys I mentioned earlier. I draw back and keeping fire to learn theses process.

There’s a bunch of information out there today after those 5 years of working with Flex framework and for sure this might be one of the best time to learn Flex and even getting deep to learn from the source. Many resources, slides, samples you can find on internet that are better worth then the livedocs, where today in my point of view are getting better and better with days to come.(Randy is doing a great job there).

But you’re very lucky today after I saw a simple, direct to point white paper to learn the process of doing components in Flex. Kudos to James Polanco and Aaron Pedersen . They’ve released a documentation that is worth to read for any developer that reads this blog or works with Flex development, with simple words any dummy developer that has a minimum of 6 months of experience in Flex framework can learn on the component live cycle in Flex.

Here’s the direct link for the PDF file where you can print and read in home even if you’re not in front of PC or MAC(who knows?!).

For others document I’ve collected before when I was learning this is the comprehensive list of sources I’ve got to kick ass in as3 components for Flex, in a TOP of 10 resources sites:

1. Slide share collection of slides that get you ahead in this field.
2. Live Docs on Advanced Flex Components
3. For who without free time to learn and want learn fast.
4. Like a to-do-check-list for any developer who wants to check your component before use it.

5. A nice review that was my second text on learning.
6. A nice diagram and complete diagram of workflow where you can print and never forgot.
7.Implementing accessibility on to your flex components.
8. How to write non-visual Flex components.
9. A nice one read for non-visual flex components.
10. And the last but no least a great white paper of doing Flex 3 Components int he right way. (This is recent and didn’t had the lucky to read in that time).

Enforce your development skills with this little list, has a lot of other resources like Jessen Warden blog and gets a lot of boiler list of tips and tricks for flash platform developers, google code, with a 1.333 projects tags as Flex and you save time in light up new ideas of components, check that before.

Hope you enjoy.