Flex is Adobe's technology family for creating cross-platform RIA and is similar to Ajax (open standards), Silverlight (Microsoft), JavaFX (Sun), and OpenLazlo. The main advantage Flex has over its competition is that it runs on the ubiquitous Flash Player. Additionally, Adobe has progressively eliminated the major cost barriers to adoption of Flex by mainstream web developers and sites: Flex 2 eliminated the need to license an expensive Flex Server, and the freely available Flex 2 SDK made it possible to build and deploy applications without purchasing the Flex Builder IDE. With the forthcoming Flex 3, the technology has been open-sourced and is publicly available in beta form for free download. The price of the Flex Builder IDE has been cut in half to $250, and made completely free to students for academic uses. This book introduces Flex 3 in easy-to-follow lessons that allow novices to fully grasp the fundamentals. You will find a wide-range of topics covered, such as working with MXML and ActionScript, and creating dashboards, mashups, and emulators. Real-world examples and reusable sample code are included in the book.