Humor4u

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun . Check out Skinning Components in Flex 4 for an overview of the awesome new component/skinning architecture in Flex 4. Flex 4: Get some skin in the game...

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun . Check out Linear Gradients in Flex 4 for an overview of using linear gradients in the new graphic primitives in Flex 4.

There's a basic philosophical question that is fundamental to so many situations in life: If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If you tell a joke and nobody hears it, is it funny? If your children respect you, are they really teenagers? The equivalent in the book world is: If your book isn't sold on Amazon.com, has it really been published? I'm happy to say that Flex 4 Fun now passes this last existence proof; the book is available for pre-order on Amazon.com . The book is at the printers now, supposedly available in hard-copy in mid-September. At Amazon's discount of 34% off the list price of $36, it seems like a pretty good deal to me. Notice that the Amazon price of $24.39 is just shy of the $25 you'll need to reach for free shipping. Which is probably just the excuse you were looking for to finally pick up When I Am King... . By the way, if any reader is so inspired, it would be great if you posted a review on Amaz...

As promised, the eBook of Flex 4 Fun has been updated to the final version of the text, which was uploaded for printing last week. So if you bought the eBook already, a fresh download will give you the final bits. If you didn't buy the eBook version already, what are you waiting for? Oh, you want the hardcopy version so that you can enjoy its graphical goodness in the way that Gutenberg intended? Well, you'll still have to wait a bit for that. Even now, armies of typesetters are setting up printing presses to make a run at printing the tome. Look for the book in bookstores and online in mid-September.

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun . Check out Fills in Flex 4 for an overview of fills for the new graphic primitives in Flex 4.

If you listen closely, you can probably hear it; the slight rustling of hundreds of pages, the chuckles of the shop foreman as he reads the section headings and subtle footnote humor, the collective sigh of the machinery as it mass-produces page after page of graphics programming wisdom. After months of writing, followed by many more months of editing and revising (it's still unbelievable to me, and more than a little depressing, to know how much you can continue working on your own text and still find things to improve), Flex 4 Fun has gone to print. It's a bit like being put out to stud, except that books are self-reproducing and there's little chance that one of the offspring would win the Triple Crown. If all goes well at the printer, there should be hardcopy available in mid-September, right before the JavaOne conference, and in plenty of time for your holiday programming-book-giving needs. Just imagine what your mother will say when she opens that completely unexpec...

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun . Check out Stroke of Genius: Drawing Lines in Flex 4 for an overview of the stroke object, used for defining the properties of lines and outlines for the new graphic primitives in Flex 4.

Varargs, a feature of the C language since roughly the late Victorian era, was introduced into the Java language in JDK1.5. I love varargs. They allow me to declare a function flexibly with the ability to take zero, one, or several parameters. This ability is useful when the user may have an unpredictable number of things to add to some data structure, eliminating the need for them to create some collection to pass the parameters into your function. It makes for a nice API. And I'm all about nice API. (And donuts). But sometimes varargs don’t work so well. I suppose it’s because I expect too much of them. Like when you meet someone that you really like, so you call them every few minutes or so, then hang around outside their apartment and workplace and friends' houses until they get a restraining order on you. It’s not that they weren’t really cool and worth getting to know, but that your needs weren't necessarily compatible. I was working recently on some API improvements ...