The Official Flex Team Blog

Here’s your chance to have your cookbook recipe considered for the print version of the Flex 3 Cookbook from O’Reilly Media!

Imagine that, your name immortalized in one of O’Reilly’s “animal” books!

As you might already know, the online version of the Adobe Flex Cookbook at http://www.adobe.com/go/flex_cookbook is a place where you can share and get code recipes (solutions) to common development questions. It was created in partnership with O’Reilly Media with the idea to make the community inclusive to the print-version of the book, as well as be an online repository for coding solutions that the community could use at any time.

Now is your chance to be considered for the print cookbook! Here’s how to do it:

1. Go to http://www.adobe.com/go/flex_cookbook.


2. Post your recipe. Consider posting a recipe based on one of the suggested topics below by the deadline mentioned. (This list came from the Flex 3 Cookbook authors (Josh Noble, Todd Anderson, and Abey George), who are writing furiously, and are in the process of deciding which entries from the online cookbook will be included. Will it be yours? I hope so!).
3. In the online cookbook recipe form, select “yes” to O’Reilly opt-in question, this allows O’Reilly to contact you about your recipe, as we always want to respect your privacy.
4. That’s it–the authors (Josh, Todd, Abey) will consider your post for the print cookbook. They’ll let you know if they are considering your post, they’ll contact you directly, and/or suggest changes to get it ready for publication!

Call for topics in the Flex cookbook (online version):

Deadline: By 15 November 2007

TileList and Tree:

• Drag and Drop TileLists
  
• TileList effects
  
• Tree effects/images
  


Collections:

• Filtering collections
  
• Sorting XML, XMLCollections, XMLListCollections Using Remote data sources for a collection
  

Deadline: By 1 January 2008

Charts:

• Creating custom chart renderers
  
• Creating effects for Charts
  
• Drag and Srop chart items in a chart
  


Services and ServerSide communication:

• Using messaging with LiveCycle
  
• Using data-push techniques with Flex 3
  
• Flex-Ajax bridge
  


Unit Testing:

• General topics, pretty much anything would be interesting
  


Internationalization:

• Internationalization strategies
  
• Using non-alphabetic character sets
  
• Accessibility issues
  


Other ideas

• Programmatic Skinning recipes
  
• Any clever Scale-9 ideas
  
• Any AdvancedDataGrid recipes
  
• Any OLAGrid recipes
  
• Anything really clever with Javascript Integration (comment from Joshua: I’d love to get some more of that stuff in the book because I think it’s going to be really important going forward.)
  
• Printing tricks and tips
  
• Accessibility and Creating Accessible Components Module
  
• RSL library tricks, advice, recipes (I think we’ve got a pretty good range of stuff there but I’m sure we missed something and it is a big topic).
  
• Working with Bitmaps, BitmapData, and Images
  

You might be asking: What do I get out of this?

• Your name, a URL of your choice, and a one-line bio attributed to your recipe in the book
  
• Fame and (possibly) fortune at being published in an O’Reilly “animal” book!
  
• Sharing your coding solution with countless others and helping them understand how to code really great Flex apps. (I know this last one is immeasurable, but we’ve all experienced how good it can feel to help out someone else.)

FAQ

• Will entries be proofread, edited, tech reviewed? Yes.
  
• Can I post recipes that are from my blog, or articles I’ve posted on my own personal website? Yes, as long as they have not been published elsewhere, I am more than happy to see you share your blog posts/articles with the Flex developer audience thru the Flex cookbook.
  

Write me with any questions or suggestions! I’m at amywong at adobe.com. As I mentioned in my previous posts, we’re also continuing to improve the online cookbook, month by month!

Amy Wong
Adobe Senior Technical Editor
Cookbooks, Flex & ColdFusion Dev Centers