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Hello! Flex 4 Changes with Flex 4 Final SDK (and Errata)

Sunday, April 4, 2010

Short Version:

Download the Hello! Flex 4 Code that works with Flex 4 Final


Long Version:

So, I wrote an introductory Adobe Flex book called Hello! Flex 4.

Here’s its pretty cover:

It was going to ship last year, based on Flex 4 Beta 1. However, Adobe delayed the Flex 4 Final release and instead released a Beta 2 version of Flex 4.

This beta version broke the book. Specifically, they changed s:SimpleText to s:Label.

So, I spent a couple days madly modifying the fully typeset version of the book to update it to Flex 4 Beta 2.

We then had to make a decision (i.e. a guess) about whether there would be any more breaking changes in Flex 4 Final, or whether we could release the book based on Beta 2. We decided to ship the book, since the reasoning was that any release SDK changes would be minor.

Now that the Flex 4 Final SDK is out, I still think we made the right decision.

However, there are some changes which means that certain parts of the book need an update. This post will go over the big picture changes. To get the updated code for Hello! Flex 4, which works with Flex 4 Final, click here. (If you are using the released version of Flash Builder 4, you want this code!)

1. A namespace change

First, the big, capricious, annoying change:

xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/halo“

is now

xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx“

Sigh.

This means that I have a namespace bug in essentially all the MXML files in the book. It’s minor, but it may trip up newcomers.

Note that this also affects the CSS:

@namespace mx "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/halo";

is now

@namespace mx "library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx";

2. Two Way Data Binding and Model Objects Has Been Fixed

This is a Good Thing, but it means that the part of Session 3 that warns about two-way binding and model objects (session03/src/TwoWayBindingClobbersModel.mxml) is now outdated. I’m happy about this though, and am glad that was a bug and not a “feature”!

3. Two Way Data Binding, When Thrown Around All Over The Place, Can Crash the Flash Player

In Session 12 I threw around a bunch of two-way data bindings to the same variable. No, I’m not sure why I did this, but it seemed fun at the time. Turns out that with the release version of the Flex 4 SDK this now crashes the latest Flash Player (10.0.45.2). I’m not sure if this is a bug or feature. To fix the code in Session 12, all you do is change all but one of the two-way data bindings (@{_bread}) to the _bread variable to one-way data bindings ({_bread}). (The one-way data bindings have no @ sign.)

4. I Have a Horribly Sloppy Data Binding Bug in Session 14c

As an astute reader (hi Dusan!) points out, the code in Session 14c has a data binding bug. This bug existed in both Flex 4 Beta 2 and Flex 4 Final, since it’s my bug!

Specifically, I was binding to a getter which was never being triggered, so the Player 1 Turn / Player 2 Turn label would never get displayed. You can actually see this bug in a screenshot on page 84, since there’s no label showing there beside the New Game button! Argh.

Anyway, in the revised code for the book, I fix this by just making the BoardDisplay class expose a board variable (which was called _board in the book), and then I just bind to that.

I have no idea how I missed this.

5. SkinnableContainer now uses a BasicLayout by default, so the screenshot on Page 97 is outdated

It now looks like this:
page97

This is a very minor difference…

That’s it!

I’ve now tested all 26 workshop sessions and the chapter 7 SocialStalkr application with Flex 4 Final. Other than my one very sloppy bug and the annoying namespace change, everything is pretty good.

If you read the book, thanks! If you spot any more bugs not shown here, please email me (peter@ruboss.com).

Thanks for reading!

Download the Hello! Flex 4 Code that works with Flex 4 Final



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Stealth Mode vs. Customer Development and Lean Approaches

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Historically for software startups or authors, it has taken about a year, often spent in isolation or “stealth mode” and funded by outside investors (angels or VCs, publishers), to develop and release the first version.

As Steve Blank and Eric Ries point out, the challenge is that quite often you’ll build or write something that nobody wants! This is the problem that Steve Blank (with Customer Development) and Eric Ries (with the Lean Startup, which builds on Customer Development and Agile Software Development approaches) tried to solve.

Nobody has tried to conceptually solve it for publishing.

Some technical publishers (The Pragmatic Programmers, O’Reilly, Manning) have created beta book programs, in which a book is published before it’s done. However, this book has a development editor, and the plan of the book is already largely established. So the point of releasing the book early is to get buzz and early sales, not to determine the direction of the book.

If you release a book early enough and build a good enough community, this community can serve the role of Development Editor.

What I did with Flexible Rails is closer to the ideas of Customer Development and Lean Startups:

I released the book as early as possible, after about 2 months of evenings and weekends.

I was simultaneously proud of the book (it contributed an essentially–with the exception of Stuart Eccles’ post–new idea to the world) and embarrassed by the book (it was extremely rough around the edges).

I didn’t have an outline.

I wasn’t sure if I would talk about REST. (Hell, Rails didn’t even officially support REST when I released the first version.)

I iterated on the book with feedback from my readers. When I wasn’t sure how to proceed, I took a poll to get feedback. (Yes, I actually did this.)

This approach evolved over the last few years, along with its name.

In 2007 I called this idea “Books as a Service” in a blog post. In 2008 I called it “Publishing 2.0″ in a talk I gave at Trent. In 2009, since I’d spent months soaking up the ideas of Steve Blank and Eric Ries, I called it “Lean Publishing”. I’m happy I did, since “leanpub.com” is a lot catchier than “booksasaservice.com” or “sopobo.com” (for self-published books).

In some ways I feel bad that all of these names, from “Books as a Service” to “Leanpub” are essentially derivative, in that they were based on names of important movements (”Software as a Service”, “Web 2.0″, “Lean Startup”) of the given year. No man is an island, after all, and I certainly believe in acknowledging my sources — my university essays often had oven 100 footnotes! (If this was one of those essays, I would have footnoted the previous sentence.)

So, just as Eric Ries arrived at the name Lean Startup from the Lean Manufacturing idea from the Toyota Production System, I’m using the word Leanin Lean Publishing to mean the application of Lean Startup principles to the writing and publishing of books.

First and foremost is the principle that Stealth Mode has no place in Lean Publishing, just as it has no place in Lean Startups.

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Authors and Founders

Saturday, April 3, 2010

Both writing a book and creating a startup are highly creative processes undertaken by one or a few people working closely together.

With books, these strange people are called “authors”; with startups, they are called “founders”.

Where the comparison breaks down, obviously, is that successful founders end up growing their startups into companies full of tens, hundreds or thousands of employees, whereas successful authors accomplish something that resembles successful musicians: they remain essentially standalone artists, but they can work with publishing companies (or not) and make money from spinoff work (performing / speaking fees / consulting), etc.

However, the fact that these diverge on success is not not interesting to me, so I’ll ignore it.

What is interesting is how successful authors and startup founders act before having succeeded but once they are on the path to success.

A good model for authors is what 37signals did with Getting Real, which was to blog in order to build up a large following of readers, and then extracting the content for the book from the blog posts. Blogging is publishing, so what they were doing is publishing early, publishing often and listening to their readers (for example, they are engaged in their blog comments).

Disclosure: This approach of building a large following with one’s blog and then selling an e-book to them, followed by producing a more highly curated print book, is what my company is trying to enable doing with Leanpub, so this isn’t just passive observation on my part. So you can either think “he’s putting his money where his mouth is” or “he’s a marketing shill” — or both!

For startup founders, a good model is the Lean Startup model advocated by Eric Ries, which applies Steve Blank’s principle of doing Customer Development to grow you product with the intimate feedback of a handful of “earlyvagelist” customers and using this approach to achieving product/market fit. Instead of the “publish early, publish often and listen to your readers” approach of blogging and Lean Publishing, it’s the “release early, release often and listen to your customers” approach of Customer Development and Open Source software.

The “x early, x often, listen to your y’s” approach is not just wordplay.

At their core, these approaches are identical.

Both of these approaches are essentially this:

1. Build An Audience.
2. ???
3. Profit!

Step 1 is best done by writing a blog and using Twitter. (Oh, it helps to have a product too, if you’re a company.)

Step 2 has many variations.

My favorite one for self-published authors is:
2. Sell them the e-book based on a curated version of the blog.

My favorite one for bootstrapped startup founders is:
2. Sell them a monthly subscription.

This is what 37signals did in both cases.

Now, if you are really good at #1. Build An Audience, you will attract the interest of third parties. (And if you’re spectacularly good at #1–think Facebook or Twitter–you can create what are legitimately billion dollar companies before earning a profit.)

For startup founders, these strange people are called “Angels” or “VCs”, and they have lots of money.

For authors, these strange people are called “Publishers”, and they have not as much money as VCs.

If you work with these third parties, the gist of it is that you can have a better chance of having a huge hit, but you can also get in a situation where something that would be a modest success if you were self-publishing or bootstrapping would earn you essentially nothing.

It’s a fair trade, as long as you know what you’re getting into. 37signals rails (haha) against VC funding, but for Next Big Thing businesses it’s appropriate. Similarly, publishers are appropriate for books like Twilight. For books that will “only” sell, say, 5 or 10 thousand copies over their lifetime, however, you’re better off self-publishing.

(An interesting thing is whether publishers are appropriate for books like Rework, in which the authors already had a huge established fan base. It will be interesting to know if Jason Fried and DHH make more or less from Getting Real or Rework — and separately, if they would have made more money just selling PDFs of Rework… My guess is that they were able to negotiate a great royalty percentage, since because of the success of Getting Real, they deservedly had all the power…)

So what’s the point here?

Blog.
Tweet.
Build An Audience.
Then monetize.

If you want to do things the Old Fashioned way, you call monetize “make money” and you do this by “selling” stuff to “customers” for “money”. And the best way to do this is $19 or $29 at a time, not $0.99 at a time (in a App Store) or $0.02 at a time (with AdSense or Amazon affiliate money).

Or you could just whore your blog out with Dreamhost or Thesis affiliate links…

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The Casino Hotel

Saturday, April 3, 2010

I worked in 3 startups in Silicon Valley before founding my own startup Ruboss, and pivoting it into Leanpub. I’ve also written two books, Flexible Rails (self-published and then published with a traditional publisher) and Hello! Flex 4 (with a traditional publisher). So, I have experience with both, and what I’m going to say now is based on some amount of personal experience as both a startup founder, early employee and author.

First, doing a startup is like gambling. You are typically betting between 1 and 4 years of your life that this startup is special, that this is one of the (supposedly) 10% that will succeed.

Supposedly, a startup has a 10% chance of success, a 20% chance of limping along miserably and a 70% chance of lighting all the investors’ money on fire.

So, if you expect to have a 40 year career, and you can give 10 promising startups 4 years of your life each, then on average you should have about 1 success. Problem is, this is integer math, so for many people this will work out to 0 successes. Expected value is an average, after all. Another problem is that time matters: if you get a successful startup early, you can use the proceeds to fund the rest of your career. You can be a founder a lot earlier if you don’t have to worry about pedestrian things like mortgages etc.

Yes, a lot of your success has to do with your own effort (especially if you’re a founder), but there is luck involved too.

For example: I worked at a BPM company for years before being laid off. I was actually the “superhero of the month” the month I was laid off. However, if I’d been laid off 3 months earlier, I may have gotten into Google, pre-IPO. (In theory, I could have followed my former boss to a company that was bought by Google.) So the point is, if I hadn’t been a “superhero” I could have been a Google millionaire.

So, since Silicon Valley is essentially a bunch of startups, and since working at a startup is (if you’re doing it properly) an all-consuming thing, the startup life is like staying at a casino hotel.

You check in, try your best, and through your own best efforts (if you’re playing a game like poker that has skill involved) and luck you can become wealthy or broke.

(The song Hotel California predates me–I’m not *that* old–but I’m old enough to know of its existence. So maybe this is the new one?)

Either way, at some point, unless you become successful (”…if you want a bigger one, Hillsborough or Atherton, better hope the same thing happened to your spouse…”), you’ll want to leave so you can start a family and buy a house somewhere normal.

(In my case, I did that, but the lure of the startup life meant that I founded Ruboss. I’m trying to do a Silicon Valley startup in the Vancouver BC area, which means bootstrapping off of consulting revenue to build Leanpub.)

So, to recap: a startup is risky, all-consuming, and there’s a high probability of failure.

It is a casino hotel. It’s also a tournament.

You know what is also a tournament? Writing a book.

Instead of the In-N-Out burger (Silicon Valley’s secret weapon, forget what Steve Blank says about Stanford!) and caffeine that fuel startups today, authors have cafes. (They used to have smoky cafes, but now they have Starbucks.)

Amazon.com sells millions of books, but unless you’re in the top 10,000 or so the amount of money you’ll earn from your print books is minimal. Another tounament.

Yet month after month, just as you hear about some other massively successful new company that came out of (what to you was) nowhere, (Plenty of Fish, Facebook, Zynga. Zynga!?!) you’ll hear about some massively successful new author (Stephenie Meyer!?!).

And this is enough.

The startups and authors that slavishly copy will fail (is there a startup equivalent of fanfic?), but there will be new innovation, etc etc.

Yes, I just called Stephenie Meyer innovative. Ugh. (Maybe the books are good–I’ve watched the movies with my wife, and that’s plenty enough for me.)

So that was a lot of blah blah blah, what’s the point of this post?

First, the economics of startups and books are similar. It’s a casino. (If you believe it’s mostly based on skill and hard work, you can call also call it a tournament, and you’d be right. However, for employee #100, it’s more of a casino.) You can also describe the distribution of success as a Long Tail, or a power law, or whatever. My guess is that if you draw a graph of startup revenue and book revenue, it will be the same (long tail) graph with different magnitude on the Y axis. So, the main difference is that being a successful startup founder pays better than a successful author (by orders of magnitude), but that’s a detail… (Yes, I just buried the lede here. That’s probably the only decent few sentences in this post.)

Second, writing a book or doing a startup is all-consuming. It’s a hotel. I’ve put my wife through both, repeatedly, and crunch time on one resembles crunch time on another.

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Screw Romance, You are Creating a Product

Saturday, April 3, 2010

(Note: This is the first of the more detailed posts mentioned in my book outline for Lean Publishing. This is the first post under the “A Book is a Startup” chapter. These posts are the rough drafts for those chapters; the editing will be done in the manuscript stage on Leanpub, not the blog stage here…)

In the Hacker News discussion following one of my previous posts, one commenter wrote:

Listening to your customers as you go along is a great idea for a startup and a really terrible idea for a book. If you listen to your customers you are guaranteed to get a very mediocre book. A good book has to continually challenge and surprise the reader.

Imagine if Dostoevsky had listened to his customers when he wrote “Notes from the Underground.”

Unfortunately, there are many more books like Getting Real, Rework and Linchpin than there are books like Notes From Underground and The Brothers Karamazov.

Why do I say unfortunately?

Well, for one, most authors aren’t Dostoyevsky. Jason Fried, DHH and Seth Godin aren’t Dostoyevsky. Neither am I. Neither are you.

So, when looking for inspiration about how to write, market and publish books today, my claim is that rather than look to some of the most brilliant artists (Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, etc.) that ever lived, you should instead look to some of the most brilliant self-promoters alive now (Jason Fried, DHH, Seth Godin).

What do they do?

First, they blog. A lot. This builds up their fan base.

Second, they sell products that are based on their blog to their fan base. Jason Fried and DHH’s next book should be called The Audacity of Dupe, since they actually had the audacity to sell essentially the same book twice: Rework was essentially just a curated and edited subset of Getting Real, which was just a curated and edited subset of their company’s blog, Signal vs. Noise.

However, while Rework and Getting Real didn’t really introduce any new content that wasn’t on Signal vs. Noise, they deserve all the success that both books have enjoyed.

Why?

Quite simply, there are interesting ideas on Signal vs. Noise. And those ideas are presented in a fairly entertaining and accessible way.

So, for those of us who read Signal vs. Noise, Rework and Getting Real are a $20 tip jar for Signal vs. Noise. And for those people who don’t read Signal vs. Noise, Rework and Getting Real are new books filled with interesting ideas.

I should note that this is not an insight on my part; Jason Fried and DHH themselves describe this process as selling their byproducts. From Rework:

Our last book, Getting Real, was a by-product. We wrote that book without even knowing it. The experience that came from building a company and building software was the waste from actually doing the work. We swept up that knowledge first into blog posts, then into a workshop series, then into a .pdf, and then into a paperback. That by-product has made 37signals more than $1 million directly and probably more than another $1 million indirectly. The book you’re reading right now is a by-product too.

Now, I’m sure that 100 years from now, nobody will mention Getting Real or Rework (or Flexible Rails or Hello! Flex 4), and people will still read Notes From Underground.

The trick is to ask yourself this:

What are you creating?

Are you creating great, timeless art that will make your name be remembered for centuries? Good for you; I’m jealous. Stop reading this right now and go write!

Or, are you creating something good, something that is of value in 2010, but is not timeless or genius? In other words, are you creating something that resembles Getting Real or Flexible Rails?

(Sorry you’re not Dostoyevsky; I’m not either.)

However, on a positive note: Congratulations, you are creating a product. Even better, this product can be a success for you right now, even if you don’t have a publisher.

Both Getting Real and Flexible Rails were self-published (on Lulu). Both Getting Real and Flexible Rails got to the Top 100 on Lulu by revenue. (Getting Real got a lot higher, as Jason Fried and DHH started with a vastly larger audience than I did!)

The way that both books got to the top 100 on Lulu was by publishing early, publishing often and listening to your readers. Jason Fried and DHH did this by first blogging the ideas at their company’s Signal vs. Noise blog. I did this with Flexible Rails by releasing the book after only a few months writing it, and by releasing about 23 versions over the span of 18 months while the book was in-progress.

When I was in high school I tried to create art. I wrote poetry, short stories and even song lyrics for an entire album. I had long hair, I listened to too much of The Smiths, read Nietzsche and Sartre and had a miserable existence outside of my academic achievements. Guess how my art was?

Awful. Abysmal. Cover-your-head-in-shame.

However, there were three consequences I learned from my attempt to be an artist:

First, I created a great name for a band: “The Philosopher Kings”. Turns out someone else also had that idea! (I’m not sure who had the idea first, but what I learned is that it doesn’t matter.) This was the first time I learned how execution was everything, and ideas were almost worthless. It also possibly indirectly led to my current domain name fetish, since domain names are a way of timestamping ideas.

Second, I wrote an allegorical story about a girl I had a 4-year, all-consuming, unrequited crush on. Published it in the student newspaper and everything, since I was convinced I could do it without being figured out. I was right: the story was well-received, the girl didn’t know, and a different girl thought it was about her and decided (briefly) to become my girlfriend. Learned a few lessons from that too.

Third, I decided to not write anything (other than for school) until I had something to say. This led me to write absolutely nothing except academic essays between high school and Flexible Rails (and its successor, Hello! Flex 4). Maybe one day I’ll write fiction; I still don’t think I have anything to say in that area though.

What’s the point of what I just said?

Simple: Screw Romance, You Are Creating a Product

This product is not just a book. It includes you, your personal brand, blog, social network, tweets, etc…

Technical books are not art. Business books are not art. Most blogs are not art.

What are they? Ideas being marketed.

37signals has made millions from Getting Real with the following combination: good ideas + brilliant self-promotion

I made tens of thousands from Flexible Rails with the following combination: decent ideas + decent self-promotion + innovation on how to sell in-progress PDFs

The lessons I learned creating and selling Flexible Rails and that I learned from watching how 37signals created and sold Getting Real are what I am describing in Lean Publishing, and what my company Ruboss is building with Leanpub.

Finally, a note: if you think this post meanders a bit, well, you’re right. One lesson I am still trying to learn from 37signals and Seth Godin is to blog more often. I’m a perfectionist, which is a real problem when writing and absolutely fatal when blogging. So I’m going to counteract this by just posting first drafts of essays (like this one) as my blog posts, and not do any editing until the manuscript stage. (These posts about Lean Publishing will make it into my Lean Publishing book on Leanpub, once I’m self-publishing it. What I realized is that I need more blog posts, and less editing, procrastinating, etc., otherwise I won’t have anything that resembles a manuscript. Also, it fits with the whole “worse is better” approach and “publish early, publish often” which should be things which I practice as well as preach…)

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Introducing the Technology Adoption and Information Distribution Lifecycle

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

So, my co-founder Scott Patten mentioned to me today that Kent Beck had recently tweeted the following:

dear @ericries, you bastard :-) i can’t figure out what the technology adoption lifecycle looks like for a book. it’s bugging me.

This is yet another one of those “get off your ass you moron” moments for me.

See, I had already drawn this up on my computer, but I hadn’t released it since I couldn’t find a completely free to use bell curve to use as a starting point, and my Adobe Illustrator skills are awful. So a rough version of it has sat on my laptop for months…

So after hearing about Kent beck’s tweet today, I grabbed a Sharpie and drew a version of Geoffrey Moore’s Technology Adoption Lifecycle from his book Crossing the Chasm:

tal

I then photocopied it a bunch of times and grabbed 3 highlighters, and drew …

The Technology Adoption and Information Distribution Lifecycle



First, we’ll see what this looks like for print books. Since print books take a while to get written, edited, copy-edited, printed, put on trucks and shipped, my claim is it looks like this:

taidl_print

Also, since shelf space is worth money, print books don’t go all the way to the end of the curve. (Yes, print-on-demand + Amazon will change this.)

Next, blogs. People start blogging about something new and shiny right away. Once it reaches the mainstream, however, it’s less blog-worthy. So blogs cover the area under the curve, except they die off before the technology itself. (That said, those blogs are typically left online, so they’re still relevant. I could have drawn “dead blogs” to cover the rest of the curve. Dead technology gets dead blogs.)

taidl_blogs

Next, completed e-books. This resembles print books, since it takes time to write, edit, copy-edit and typeset an e-book. The curve starts a bit sooner, however, since the bits don’t need to sit on trucks.

taidl_ebook_complete

Smart publishers such as The Pragmatic Programmers, O’Reilly and Manning have realized this and created “beta book” (or “rough cut” or “early access”) programs to sell in-progress e-books, in order to get more of the curve:

taidl_ebook_inprog

This means that when you combine in-progress e-books and completed e-books, they cover the whole curve:

taidl_ebook_all

…and this is why my company Ruboss is building Leanpub.

Before Ruboss created Leanpub, authors who were self-publishing books, whether they were technical books, cookbooks or novels, have had no good way of publishing and selling an e-book while it was being written. I know this from personal experience: when I was writing and self-publishing Flexible Rails, I cobbled together infrastructure, using Google Groups for its mailing list and using Lulu to sell the PDF. However, there was no way of automatically distributing updates to my readers. I didn’t even know who my readers were!

Leanpub changes this, and solves the information distribution problem for self-published authors, for the entire span of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle…

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Welcome Hacker News Readers!

Sunday, March 28, 2010

If you’re coming here from Hacker News (the post “Lean Publishing Principle #1: A Book is a Startup, So Use Lean Startup Principles”) just made the front page!) and you’re interested in Lean Publishing, please consider subscribing to my RSS feed or following me on Twitter (@peterarmstrong).

My company has just launched a site called Leanpub which is focused on implementing the ideas about Lean Publishing explained here. If you wonder why I’m posting rather infrequently, it’s because I feel the need to shut up and code in advance of writing some of these ideas down! But they’ll all come out this year…

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Lean Publishing Outline

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

I’ve been extremely busy with client work lately, and we’ve been working extremely hard on Leanpub. However, I have an outline for my Lean Publishing book figured out now, and I’m just going to post it right now in advance of actually, oh, writing the posts!

So, without further ado, the new outline for Lean Publishing…

Introduction: Why Lean Publishing?

A Book is a Startup

  • Screw Romance, You are Creating a Product
  • The Casino Hotel
  • Authors and Founders
  • Stealth Mode

Lean Startups and Customer Development

  • This is the Easiest Time in History to Start a Startup
  • Customer Development and the OODA Loop
  • The Lean Startup: Customer Development + Agile Methodology
  • Open Source Software: Release Early, Release Often and Listen to your Customers

Lessons Learned from Lean Startups

  • Publish Early (Fail Fast)
  • Publish Often and Listen to Your Readers
  • Build a Community of Readers

Lessons Learned from Blogs

  • Blogs are Free Beta Books
  • Successful Blogs Build Communities
  • Successful Bloggers do Customer Development
  • Underpants Gnomes and Blog Authors
  • The Most Successful Bloggers Monetize their Communities

Lean Publishing in Five Steps

  1. Start a Blog
  2. Produce and Sell an In-Progress E-Book
  3. Finish the E-Book Using Lean Startup Principles
  4. Market the Completed E-Book
  5. Transition to Other Channels

Publishing 2.0

  • Publishers add Most Value at the End of a Book
  • Develop Your BATNA Before Negotiating with Publishers

About the Author

About Leanpub

Acknowledgments

Look interesting? Subscribe and stay tuned…

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Hello! Flex 4 Launch Update: Free Excerpts and Glowing Reviews

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Hello! Flex 4 launched to some glowing reviews!

First of all, however, the free stuff…

Session #14, one of my favorite workshop sessions from Hello! Flex 4, is reprinted in full in the following Adobe DevNet article:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/flex4_graphics_game.html

You can also read chapter 1 and chapter 3 for free at:

http://manning.com/armstrong3/

Now for the reviews.  Hello! Flex 4 has also been getting excellent reviews:

First, Ryan Stewart’s blog:

“Peter Armstrong is a gung-ho kind of guy. He has the very first book on Flex 4, Hello! Flex 4 and it’s currently available on Amazon. I got a PDF copy of the book and it is a really fun way to get up to speed on Flex 4. A ton has changed including the component model, how we do states, a new graphic language called FXG, as well as other tweaks and optimizations. This book goes through them all and provides a great overview of how to use Flex 4 with existing projects and frameworks . . . Well worth it for anyone who wants to see what’s coming in Flex 4.”

- from http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com/2009/12/the-first-book-on-flex-4-hello-flex-4/

Second, from the Amazon reviews page:

“If you’ve been thinking about Flex, or know someone who wants to get a basic understanding in a very short amount of time you’ll want to check out Hello Flex 4 by Peter Armstrong.

This short 234 paged book is an action packed light hearted casual read for programmers who are curious about Flex but may not be at the point where they want to invest a ton of time until they get a general understanding of how it works and if it’s a right match for them.

The tone of the book is laid back, and Peter doesn’t bore you with exhaustive detail, while at the same time there are small cartoons to keep it fun. Structure wise the approach uses sessions/labs to demonstrate concepts, and these sessions provide real working code. As each session progresses it builds upon the last - leading up to a full blown application.

So the examples are small and easy to understand, while at the same time being practical that you could then apply for you own purposes. In the very last chapter he’s a bit gutsy by incorporating the Cairngorm MVC framework as part of the lab… Cairngorm is a pretty heavy duty topic, so my reaction was would using it in a introductory book be good idea?

Well, if you really wanted to get an honest quick feel if Flex is right for you, you might as well get a taste of what a framework driven Flex application would look like. To my surprise though, Peter pulls it off, and makes Cairngorm digestible (especially considering the reader may not have any prior Flex/ActionScript exposure) by keeping it simple, to the point, and clear about what it’s role is in a Flex application.

So overall, for a quick read and low price, this is a great way to jumpstart your Flex skills.”

- Tariq Ahmed, Author of Flex 3 in Action and Flex 4 in Action in an Amazon.com review

Also, the Manning page has for Hello! Flex 4 has many other great quotes people (not me!) have said about it, including:

“Friendly and fun.”

“Armstrong again creates a must-have guide for Flex development.”

…and my favorite…

“The most fun technical book I have ever read!”

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My 2010 New Years Resolutions

Sunday, January 3, 2010

If I blog these then I have more pressure to stick to them, so here I go.  Yes, this is a more self-centered post than usual, but it will possibly be interesting to read in a year and see how it went.  I’m only including personal resolutions, not Ruboss / Leanpub ones…

My 2010 New Years Resolutions

  1. Spend more time with Caroline and Evan, including setting aside enough time to play Lego and Wii with Evan between dinner and book time.  Teach Evan using Lego Mindstorms if he’s interested.
  2. Exercise at least 3 times a week, and personal train at least once a month.  Actually do the workouts that the trainer creates (and do ALL 3 sets!), not just 1 or 2 based on how rushed or tired I am.  Go from my current 216 lbs and 36″ waist to 200 lbs and a 34″ waist.  (Yes, it’s totally stereotypical to have “go to the gym” on a New Years Resolutions list, but I don’t claim to be a beautiful and unique snowflake — only a slightly out of shape one!)
  3. Eat vegetables regularly, especially broccoli, spinach, etc.  Eat less processed food, white flour, starch, etc.
  4. Get the 7:10 train instead of the 7:40 train when working out in the morning.
  5. Blog here at least once a week, hopefully more.  Ideally, something about Lean Publishing, but if I don’t have anything interesting to say about that, then blog about something else.
  6. Limit social media and news consumption (Reddit, Hacker News, RSS feeds, TechCrunch, Twitter, etc) to 30 minutes a day. Ideally, use my iPhone to check all of this, rather than my laptop, since that way I’ll be more focused while working and less tempted to switch to distractions.
  7. Self-publish Lean Publishing on Leanpub once I have at least 50 pages worth reading.  Accomplish this by March 1.  This should include everything worth keeping from my half-completed Publishing 2.0 manuscript that I had written and abandoned a couple years ago.
  8. Promote Hello! Flex 4 better.  The ratio of about 400 hours writing to about 4 hours promoting is a really stupid one.  Specifically, make helloflex4.com link to all blog mentions, reviews, etc. Also, hook up affiliate codes and determine if it’s profitable to buy Google ads.

Obviously this isn’t a complete list of everything I need to do, but it’s measurable.  In a year I can check how many of these I kept, and make new ones for 2011.  I don’t want to make a prediction about how many I’ll actually accomplish, since I like being right and I don’t want to be self-defeating :)

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