About this Book
This is a book about Adobe AIR for Flash and Flex developers. Although it’s entirely possible to create AIR applications using HTML and JavaScript, this book focuses exclusively on using Flash and Flex to build AIR applications. The AIR APIs are remarkably similar in ActionScript and JavaScript. However, we found that trying to address all the JavaScript nuances at the same time as the Flash and Flex nuances would have resulted in an unfocused book. We opted instead to hone in on just Flash and Flex.
It’s possible that some readers will still feel that we’ve tried to cover too much territory by including both Flash and Flex coverage in one book. That is a fair critique. By including both, we necessarily had to compromise at certain points, opting to show code examples more suitable for Flash at some times and code examples more suitable for Flex at other times. Although this can be seen as a weakness, we also see it as a strength. We think this provides a greater context for understanding AIR, and it allows you to make better decisions about how best to solve a problem when building AIR applications. Ultimately, you’ll make up your own mind about whether our approach works well or not, but we certainly encourage you to view the book from our perspective.