The number one search on here is for “flex example apps” so I know it’s not only me looking for some guidance to get started with Flex 2.0.

I didn’t get into Flex the first time round, the price point was just a bit too high for a small business like mine to buy it. Now that Flex 2.0 has come out I’m having difficulty finding real world example apps or tutorials to follow so I can build solutions that will pay me in real world dollars.

Adobe to their credit have put out a lot of examples on the Flex Developer Center, they’re good for getting started but are pretty basic I can see how I would use validation, embedding assets, or handling events once I had my app going but how do I start it in the first place?

The example apps that ship with Flex are more real worldly but, unlike the samples mentioned above, are for the most part undocumented - many without even comments in the code to follow along with.

Two of the most important parts of Flex, states and components, took me a long time to find/get to in the documentation. For programmers new to Flex I don’t think they’ll dive into the docs and look for “custom components” when the problem they’re solving is code reuse or team development. States was easier to find in the docs but again was focused too deep in an app.

You don’t teach people a new spoken language by telling them everything about nouns, verds, and adjectives and 500 pages later maybe get around to a sentence. You would show them the sentence first, they wouldn’t know the exact details of connecting nouns to objects with prepositions but at least they could speak to each other and get started.

My ideal Flex example would build a simple app in a real world manner, first with states and containers, then add components, then data binding, then event delegation, finally styles, embedded assets, and transitions. All presented in a way that ties-everything-together.

Flex is an awesome tool but if people can’t find developers who know it and/or teach their current developers how to use it they’ll be turning to other free, *cough AJAX*, solutions.

*UPDATE*

I’ve found an awesome tutorial by Jesse Warden it uses cairngorm which can get pretty dense but Jesse comments everything in way that you can easily follow along, plus he gives a good overview of the app in his post before you even start looking at the code.