Last week, the blogs were abuzz with news of the very successful launch of “Programming Flex 2.0” by Joey Lott and Chafic Kazoun. It even caught Tim O’Reilly’s attention! Not only did Flex dominate the weekly stats, but it made a strong showing in the quarterly charts, as detailed in a series of reports on the state of the computer book market at O’Reilly.

There was some question whether preorders had skewed the numbers for this particular book, but it’s been over a week now, and it’s still in the top 5 on Amazon. Also worth noting: last year’s “ActionScript 3.0 Cookbook” by Joey Lott, Darron Schall and Keith Peters is still (or again?) in the top 15.

Luckily for us, both Joey and Chafic have already been confirmed as speakers at Flashforward2007 Boston! (Joey also has a very popular video training on AS3 in FlexBuilder for the lynda.com Online Training Library.) So be sure to come and congratulate them in person!

(Thanks to Tim, Ted, Ryan, JD and Kevin.)

Are there any more controversial words in technology than “open” and “free”? We’re not really qualified to analyze the deeper meaning of Adobe’s announcement that they plan to “Open Source Flex” but we’re very entertained by the diversity of public reaction, as lovingly chronicled by JD here and here. (Note: if JD makes the mistake of linking to THIS post, we’ll have what’s known in the biz as a “link loop”, and the internet will melt. Start backing up your files now just in case.)

Ryan Stewart does his usual excellent job of analyzing this news (and providing more links). And if you’re after nothing but the facts, here is Adobe’s press release and FAQ.

Our informal tally of reactions from Flashforward speaker-bloggers leads us to the (obvious) conclusion that this is an exciting and welcome move. As with any open source project, the tangible outcome will depend on what developers choose to contribute, but given the historically open spirit of the Flash and Flex communities, it’s easy to predict great things.

Several of you have been blogging about Adobe’s new CS3 Video Workshop. This is a great resource for getting up to speed on the newly-available features and workflow techniques in Creative Suite 3.

Since these training videos (which are also included on DVD in the CS3 product boxes) were produced by our colleagues at lynda.com, we thought we’d chime in with a few details about additional video training you can access if you found this video workshop to be helpful.

Several complete CS3 courses have already been released at the lynda.com Online Training Library, and more are coming soon. Sample chapters from each of these courses are available to everyone, and if you register your copy of CS3 you’ll get a one-month subscription to the Online Training Library that allows complete access to these and any other subjects you wish to learn.

As always, the training is broken into short, topic-specific chunks so you can choose whether to watch the whole thng straight through or jump straight to whatever feature you need to understand right now.

Here are some of the latest CS3 courses:

• Flash CS3 Professional Essential Training with Rich Shupe (8 hours)
• Fireworks CS3 Essential Training with Tom Green (7.5 hours)
• Illustrator CS3 Essential Training with Mordy Golding (13.5 hours)
• InDesign CS3 Essential Training with David Blatner (9 hours)
• Dreamweaver CS3 Essential Training with Garrick Chow (10.5 hours)
• Photoshop CS3 One-on-One with Deke McClelland:
  • New Features (1.5 hours)
  • The Essentials (8.75 hours)
  • Beyond the Basics (10.75 hours)
  • Advanced Techniques (9.5 hours)

There’s also free training available to get you started with the preview releases in Adobe Labs:

• Apollo Alpha Preview with Mike Chambers (1 hour)
• After Effects CS3 Professional Preview with Chad Perkins (1.25 hours)
• Premiere Pro CS3 Preview with Chad Perkins (0.5 hours)

By the time you finish with all those they’ll probably have released some more, so get started and enjoy!

Stunning news this week: the install base of Flash Player 8 has fallen below 13%! ;-)

Emmy Huang previews the March penetration stats for the Flash player, and they’re excellent: over 83% of web users in “Mature Markets” already have Flash Player 9 installed!

It seemed almost like poor planning when, last year, the Flash tools fell out of sync: thanks to Flex 2, ActionScript 3 and Flash Player 9 were the hot new setup, but the poor Flash IDE was stuck on version 8 using lowly AS2.

Yet here we are this week, and it seems like the best plan ever — the new Flash CS3 has been in your hands for at most a day or two, and your users are already able to handle whatever you can create!

Has that ever happened before?!

Normally there’s that looong delay between the exciting arrival of a new version of Flash and the day you finally say to your clients: it’s time. We can use our new toys now. The world is ready.

This time the world was already ready!

Well played, Adobe!

Just about every piece of Adobe software on your hard drive will be getting updated soon. How cool is that? Some new stuff too:

Creative Suite 3 now shipping: We’re incredibly excited to start playing with Flash CS3. While you’re waiting for the delivery guy, check out Flashmagazine’s preview (again) and make lists of the new experiments you want to try!

Everything Else CS3 available in Labs: After Effects CS3 Pro, Premiere Pro CS3, Soundbooth CS3 beta 3 and Flash Lite for BREW Publisher for Flash CS3 Pro are all ready for you to try out, along with a preview of the new knowhow help panel, and several other recent updates you may have missed.

Device Profile Update for Device Central CS3: includes new and/or improved profiles for MANY devices.

Adobe Media Player: the project formerly known as Philo. Not available for download yet, this will be a standalone FLV player and much more, and includes the long-awaited/dreaded arrival of DRM. And it’s an Apollo application!