Another Satisfied FAQu Customer

I just received my first two Fusion Authority Quarterly Updates (FAQu, as it is affectionately called) from the folks at Fusion Authority.  I don't know why I wasn't paying attention when news about this publication was originally released, but I definitely missed the boat somehow.  After seeing  Peter Bell blog about it earlier this month (he's a contributor) I decided to take the plunge.

What can I say that hasn't already been said? FAQu has great packaging, great content, and great production.  I like the size and feel of the publications, which resemble soft-cover books, allowing them to be stacked on-end in your bookshelf.  They also appear to perfectly engineered to fit the top of the, er, john..., for those folk who enjoy an extended morning constitutional.  The advertising somehow stays out of the way, not interrupting your reading flow, unlike most other publications of this ilk.  The contributors are all top notch, and are covering the hot topics in the community right now.

Michael and Judith Dinowitz, et.al. have really done an excellent job on this effort. FAQu is a quality product with great content and well worth the subscription fee. 

Total Training's Adobe Flex 2 Rich Internet Applications

This has been mentioned on several blogs already, but I will add my endorsement anyway. If you're like me and don't have a week or the money to spend on a dedicated Flex training class, there is another way to get visual hands-on Flex training.

Ben Forta mentioned this product on his blog a couple months ago, and I bought it ten minutes later. I am just getting around to watching it, and it is worth every penny of the $150 price tag.

Total Training for Adobe Flex 2 Rich Internet Applications is a 8 hour DVD training video hosted by Adobe trainer/evangelist James Talbot, that is really the best video training I have ever experienced. Talbot is very engaging as walks you through multiple lessons that deal with all aspects of Flex development best practices using Adobe's FlexBuilder 2. It's got a nice bookmark feature that will allow you to return to mulitple areas for further review.

A word of caution for ColdFusion developers: while there is plenty of content regarding data access using XML and web services, the examples are platform agnostic. You won't find examples for hooking up to a CF server and pulling data from your MS SQL/MySQL database, for instance.

If you don't have FlexBuilder yet, you can easily download a 30-day evaluation copy.

Highly recommended.

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