Flex 3 Component Solutions: Build Amazing Interfaces with Flex Components
Author: Jack Herrington
Components make Flex and Flash greater than the sum of their parts and will remain a key advantage over Silverlight for some time to come. The developer communities have created an amazing array of components, so many great ones that even mere engineers can become cutting-edge designers if only they knew which components and what to do with them.This book demonstrates and illustrates this diverse set of components with screenshots that make you stop and stare with envy when you browse the book. You'll think "I could look like a superhero if I hooked that up to our data API." This book makes it clear that it's a lot easier than you think.
In this book you'll learn:
Who is this book for?
Current Flex and Flash developers and designers, certainly. Engineers who want some incentive to get involved in RIA development so they can make themselves look like superheroes.Interesting textbook: Communication Skills for Business and Professions or Going Alone
Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
Author: Lee Siegel
From the author hailed by the New York Times Book Review for his “drive-by brilliance” and dubbed by the New York Times Magazine as “one of the country’s most eloquent and acid-tongued critics” comes a ruthless challenge to the conventional wisdom about the most consequential cultural development of our time: the Internet.
Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.
Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights,and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
Mr. Siegel has done something in which [Pauline] Kael once specialized: nailing an inchoate malaise that we already experience but cannot easily explain…Against the Machine…brings dead-on accuracy to depicting the quietly insinuating ways in which the Internet can blow your mind. And it announces exactly what's wrong with this picture.
Salon - Louis Bayard
He ranges widely, he reads closely.... He gets our attention, yes —and then the questions resume.... Siegel, in other words, has a habit of reaching for the invective nearest to hand, without much regard for the implications. Which places him, cheek by jowl, with the blogo-barbarians pounding on the gates.
Publishers Weekly
Siegel, a controversial former NewRepublic.com blogger and past Slate.com art critic, provides a fascinating look at how the Internet is reshaping the way we think about ourselves and the world. Siegel explores how the Internet affects culture and social life, particularly the psychological, emotional and social cost of high-tech solitude. Arguing that the Internet's widespread anonymity eliminates boundaries, Siegel discusses the half-fantasy, half-realism of online personas. Internet pornography, Siegel intones, collapses public and private, transforming others into the instrument of the viewer's will. By experiencing virtual selves rather than other individuals, a danger arises: people run the risk of being reduced to personas that other Internet users manipulate toward their own ends. Insightful and well written with convincing evidence to support Siegel's polemic, this book is a welcome addition to the debate on the personal ramifications of living in a wired world. (Jan.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationKirkus Reviews
News flash! The Internet has changed our lives!Anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the past 15 years is well aware that computers and the Internet have radically altered the world in many ways, some positive (e.g., quick access to random information, a convenient place to store Word documents) and some negative (e.g., less meaningful human contact). Which means that a 200-page diatribe pining for pre-Pentium days seems more than a little archaic. In his recent books, Siegel (Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television, 2007, etc.) has demonstrated a predilection for intellectualizing topics that don't necessarily merit intellectualization (Joey and Iron Chef America, for instance). Here he waxes philosophic on the Electronic Age, but he's behind the times. For instance, the YouTube, MySpace and Match.com backstories and/or functionalities are familiar to anybody with even the slightest interest in Internet culture. Siegel uses the words and thoughts of such contempo-philosophers as Malcolm Gladwell and Alvin Toffler to support or disprove his arguments, which further underscores the fact that this material has been covered better elsewhere. Of Wikipedia, Siegel writes, "Why does Wikipedia exist? If you ask its promoters the question, they'll look at you as though you were wearing a loincloth and carrying a club . . . They'll throw up their hands. 'It's convenient!' they'll say. Duh!"Siegel's snotty, Luddite attitude doesn't make much of a case for "being human."
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