Preface

If you’d asked me a few years ago if I’d ever write a book, I would have laughed at the thought. All through high school and college I loathed writing anything more than a short answer, and when it came to writing papers, I was usually one of the people asking about the minimum length required for a passing grade. Now here we are, thousands of words and hundreds of pages later, and BJ and I have survived writing our first book, twice.

So how did I go from absolutely loathing writing to being willing to dedicate so many nights and weekends to writing this book? Since the first 1.0 release of the Flex framework, I’ve been a fan. I discovered Flex while I was distaining HTML/JavaScript and browser compatibility issues. I was trying to prototype a form-heavy application with complex business rules and validation, struggling with goofy layout issues and JavaScript errors, and was looking for a better solution. Although it’s possible to make rich web applications using HTML and JavaScript, it’s easy to make ugly ones. Most of the nice AJAX frameworks we take for granted today didn’t exist at the time, and many developers had absolutely no idea what AJAX was.