Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide by Mike Chambers, et al.

[Book Review Team]

<pre>Author/s: Mike Chambers, Daniel Dura, Kevin Hoyt, Dragos Georgita
Publisher : O'Reilly
Category : Web design, HTML and JavaScript
Review by : Balaji Loganathan
Rating : 8 horseshoes</pre>
I was trying to learn Adobe AIR and was looking for some good set of learning resources. I found the book "Adobe AIR for Javascript Developers" from O'Reilly by and started reading it online. A cool book, the authors have done great job on presenting the topics as an easilit readable pocket guide. Soon after reading this book, I felt I got the right resource I want for now.

I found this book a bit more than a usual pocket guide.

If you are a beginner and don't know anything about AIR, then this book is the best bet.

The chapters were well organized to take you from novice stage to advanced stage in AIR.

Covers ADOBE AIR 1.0

Chapter I and II of this book teaches you many information and technical details about the AIR which might lots of time if you have to get it from Internet.

The authors have given lots of code snippets while explaining a topic instead of lots of theoretical text. Some thing that programmers always look for.

This book also gives an insight about Webkit engine, architecture of AIR and the security model of AIR.

The most interesting part in this book is the Mini cookbook.

The mini cookbook chapter contains worked out samples with complete code explanation. It includes samples that can help you understand (from AIR perspective) Application Chrome, Windowing, File API, File Pickers, Service and Server Monitoring, Online/Offline, Drag-and-Drop, Embedded Database, Command-Line Arguments, Networking, Sound.

This book is worth buying for its content coverage and its also very cheap.

More info at Amazon.com
More info at Amazon.co.uk

[Paul Michael]

I also enjoyed reading the book especially the mini-cookbook section.

It might be worth mentioning the this book has been released under the Creative Commons license and an e-book copy is freely downloadable from the Adobe site.

More details here.
[ May 15, 2008: Message edited by: Paul Michael ]