In Foundation Flex for Developers, Sas Jacobs explores in detail how to create professional data-centric Flex 2 and Flex 3 applications. In the first half of the book, she starts off with a brief exploration of Flex and ActionScript 3.0, before looking at application essentials in detail, including creating custom components, user and web browser interactions, binding, formatting and validating data, debugging, and more. The second half of the book focuses on connecting Flex to data sources and covers XML, Flex Data Services, PHP, ASP.NET, and ColdFusion in detail, via a series of step-by-step case studies.