Speaking of which, as a developer who relies heavily on the MXNA aggregator, I gotta say, stop spamming the aggregator guys. It is really really annoying.

You can’t honestly tell me that this post which appeared isn’t OT? : http://www.ifbin.com/news/2005/10/new-payment-options-for-ifbin.html

And don’t tell me about something on MXNA unless you’re showing all the goods. Put in your free fridays, whatever, great. Maybe regig your site to make paid content a little more accessible & searchable so at least people know what you have on the site to entice them to sign up. But keep the paid stuff out of the aggregator, it’s polluting the open source nature of dev blogging content and hurting the community, IMHO.

Right now I’ve decided to boycott you guys until the spamming stops. Then maybe I’ll think of signing up.

Thanks for the feedback. While a book doesn’t add chapters as you read it, you could buy a new one every month for the cost of the full IFBIN subscription. They may not be interactive, but that’s what I was getting at when I said that it’s a matter of personal choice. Some people learn better interactively or by studying code examples, while others prefer reading lots of theory and going it alone.

With regards to the MXNA ’spamming’, it doesn’t bother me too much whilst it’s just one company doing it. However, you must admit that if more companies used MXNA to advertise their commercial service then it would degrade the experience for the rest of us. I guess we have to rely on Macromedia keeping an eye on their aggregator feeds. If this is okay with them then I guess the rest of us have no complaint.

I can see that IFBIN will benefit some members of the community, so I wish you all the best with it! Who knows, I may even end up subscribing when I start learning Flex properly.

I have yet to see a book that adds chapters as you read it or need them. Flash By Example has 225 high quality examples (Soon to be 300+) that all contain consistant documentation and code formatting. All examples undergo quality control and are published in a format allowing for easy exploration of the code. Flex By Example is growing quickly as we are ramping up development. We will be at 100 examples within a months time.

IFBIN is different. We are 100% focused on high quality examples. We feel they are a very useful and consise form for learning and reuse. If you can see something working, you are very likly to reuse the concepts in your own work. It is impossible to see code executing within a book format, plus you have to retype the code a majority of the time and are exposed to all sorts of human error. IFBIN examples just work. It’s simple and easy once you try it.

Sorry that our blog publishing is bothersome to you. We only blog about examples using Flex and Flash and we do actually show the examples working. You will never see us make a OT blog post at IFBIN.

I really appreciate your article, it gives us a chance to clear up some misconceptions about the products. On the price $500 is for 2 products. Most people are either in the Flash or Flex camp so there is not allot of overlap in our customers.

Cheers,

Theodore Patrick IFBIN Founder and CEO

The article above is, I think, a balanced view on the IFBIN service. The conclusion is that some will benefit from it while others will be better off buying books with the money instead, depending on their personal learning habits.

Personaly I dont thave that much of an issue with the IFBIN stuff - what narks me more is the DEVMX stuff - no theres a rip off. They charge between $2 and $5 for re-prints of stuff you can find for free elase where. I have read a couple of their articles are they realy arent worththe papaer they are printed on.