This book covers all the essential features of JavaFX Platform and will teach you various aspects of the language and UI elements. It has been designed to proceed from less complex to more complex topics in a gradual manner so that you are not overwhelmed with myriad of concepts to learn and understand upfront. This book is for Flash, Silverlight, and other RIA developers looking to use and integrate JavaFX in their RIA, whether it is for desktop or mobile environments. However, our goal is to teach you JavaFX from the ground up, and you don't need prior programming expertise to use this book and hence this book is also suitable for those who are new to RIA development. Your time as a reader is extremely valuable, and you are likely waiting to read a pile of books besides this one. So we have made it concise by tightening things up and eliminating redundant examples.

We recommend that you be hands-on while reading this book, as it is mostly code-driven and will help you learn the concepts through practical exploration while reading. This way, you can actually get to program with JavaFX, rather than just reading the book, and you can also become comfortable and productive with it readily.

We have worked hard to keep pace with the changing syntax and architectures of the technology to ensure that the examples and explanations given in this book are both up-to-date and backward–compatible at least from JavaFX 1.1 to JavaFX 1.3.

Since this is a Java based technology, we have also highlighted the differences and collaborations between Java and JavaFX wherever appropriate so that even an existing Java application can be well integrated with JavaFX.

We hope this book helps you learn JavaFX quickly and makes you very hands-on and productive in coming up with a cool RIA.

—Lawrence PremKumar

—Praveen Mohan