The Lynda.com Flex 2 Essential Training – 4.5 hours of training – is a fine introduction to developing in Flex. I watched the series twice. The first time was a bit of a struggle because I didn’t have access to the training files. But, I talked work into buying the premium package so the second time I had the files to work with.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how Lynda works: you can get a month-to-month subscription for $25/month. That gives you access to all the videos on the site but you don’t get any of the files that they use. In the case of Flex that means a lot of pausing the video and typing code in and then playing a bit more of the video and repeating. That works pretty well for the Essential Training series. But there are a few times that they don’t show you all the code that a particular example is using so you’re pretty much on your own for that part. Plus, there is a bit that deals with connecting to a ColdFusion server. That’s not going to work without their files.

If you get the premium year membership – $375 – you get access to all the training files. It’s a much smoother experience to have the files beforehand and just watch the videos and make little edits here and there as you’re told from the video – or to experiment.

Of course $375 is a chunk of money to spend for watching training videos. They only have two series on Flex so you’ll probably want to see if they cover any other technologies that you might be interested in. If so then it might be worth the premium membership.

The second time through I had the files and had far fewer problems. I’m not a CF developer so I was pleased as punch that I could get the CFC files in the right place and working for the examples they had using ColdFusion and Flex together. I’ve had nothing but headaches in the past when someone supplies server side files for a tutorial. Most of the time there’s some setting that prevents them from working. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case in this instance and now I know that I have my CF server up and running correctly on my PC.

You can check out the first chapter of the training without any membership. You won’t learn a lot but it’s enough to see if you think the rest might be worth it.

In my case I would say that it was worth the $25 to watch this series even if this is the only one you watch. I particularly learned a lot with chapter 5 on Programming with Events which I made a tutorial out of here on polyGeek.

I’m watching the second series on Flex now – Flex: Beyond the Basics - and I’ll review that when I’m done. Already I can tell that it would be a real headache to try to code along with them without the files. It’s probably best to just sit back and watch if you’re going for the month-to-month subscription.