All this talk about an Apache flex book got me thinking about what I would like to read.
As a newcomer to Flex, I learned so much from this website http://blog.flexexamples.com , but it seems a lot of the examples are no longer live (what's up with that?), and many are outdated. I spend most of my development learning about Flex from Google searches that brought me to peoples' blogs. I bought the Flex Bible, which was great for the basics, but didn't answer all of those one-off questions like the blogs tackled (because the writers couldn't find it anywhere else I suppose). Now those blog links are starting to go away, and they're so hard to find anyway. Why not have a separate section of the Apache Flex website dedicated to examples that USERS can upload for others to run and view the source code? It would be like http://blog.flexexamples.com, except the content is driven by users and relevant to life with current SDKs. The critical part of the website would be just to provide an infrastructure for people to easily contribute their work. It might also include some search capability or other navigational aid, and a comments section for each example so discussions can follow. Then the users take over... I just think people learn by doing and if a website can be created with some basic infrastructure, it can grow organically over time and be a great resource to newcomers. It would also show that people are actively working and contributing to Flex (I envision future marketing efforts could say "...over 100 examples were added just this last month..." as a metric for Flex's growing relevance). The advantage over a published cookbook is that a book requires a dedicated team with long hours, it becomes outdated with newer SDK releases, covers a limited number of topics, and it's not interactive. Anyway, that's just my 2 cents for what I'd like to see from Apache Flex.
