Great books for Beginner to expert flex development

If you want to learn flex I recommend that you start with this book:

Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4 Bible
The great thing about this book is that it starts by thinking that you are a programmer. It teaches you good practices right off the bat.
Next up read:
Enterprise Development with Flex: Best Practices for RIA Developers
The next step in the evolutionary learning of any gui framework is the eco system and third party design patterns etc. This is where this book comes and covers any thing that you would otherwise need to learn by lots of searching or blogs/twitter following :)

Enjoy!

A gem on DSL syntax from the book : DSLs in Boo: Domain-Specific Languages in .NET

The reason why I fell in love with programming in the first place was the sheer quality of the information available. Compare this to say Telecom engineering where high quality material is few and hard to find. This book is just another fine example of the quality of content created for programmers.

Here are just some of the things relevant to DSL programming in general that I found intriguing in just a few pages of the book:

Gems on the syntax of the DSL: 
It is going to be an iterative process. There are no two ways about it. But like all things programming there are good and sloppy ways of going about it.

1.) A good way to come up with the syntax is to start with pretending your DSL is in plain English and write it down. e.g.
If Book Is Available then Buy it.

The syntax should cover a single scenario. You cannot imagine all the scenarios into a single syntax sample. 

2.)Now simplify the syntax sample, indenting it and breaking it into lines.g.:
if Book Is Available
    then buy book

3.)Then use your possible syntax toolbelt (that is things that are easily expressible in internal DSLs) to arrive at the final result e.g.:
if Book.IsAvailable:
    Buy

Try another scenario, iterate.
Also it is a good idea not to let the technical implementation details leak into the DSL syntax.
Also, I could have said Buy Book but rather since we check Book to be available it is clear (and less technical noisy) if we just say Buy.

There is soooo much more information packed in the book.
Disclaimer: This post is based on my understanding of the content in the book.

Book Review: DSLs in Boo: Domain-Specific Languages in .NET

In short : Buy it. This book (DSLs in Boo: Domain Specific Languages in .NET) is the best book on DSL programming that you will ever read ... and really you should read a book on DSL programming. Even if you never do it. You never know when you might need it.

This book is written by one of the smartest programmers alive. The book uses Boo as the programming language of choice for DSL. The reasons for this are mentioned in chapter two of the book under "Boo’s built-in language-oriented features" Highly convincing. And he even mentions why its a better idea than IronPython and IronRuby. Boo is a respected language and you have admit that "wrist friendly language for the CLI" is pretty catchy. Also I recommend you get sharpdevelop (now at version 4!) to play a little with Boo.

The book is as complete a DSL book as you can get. I am still going through the book and am 4 chapters in (along with reading 4 other books... one of them being for my upcomming ADO.NET 4 certification exam ... all great books ... I really should review books more often). Also it is the only book on Boo that I know of.

PS: Boo just released a .NET framework 4 version of the binaries which means that you can use it freely in your latest and greatest cutting edge applications.