[Erwin]

With no Flash experience I had no trouble building a few Flex apps, and it was the same for a team member that quickly build a performant Flex app using their table widgets (which kills something like jQuery data tables plugin even on Chrome).

I did read O'Reilly's Flex book first though. I'm not sure people code Flex for fun, so good documentation costs money.

Was this your first time writing code for a GUI toolkit? Flex has an interesting model that merges XML definition of a UI with module-based code. I don't find it particular complex compared to say, writing an MFC application or C Win32 code to write a UI. I actually prefer it to the jungle of HTML, CSS, JS and dozens of JS libraries which aren't really geared for a professional type UI and fall down when you want to display 10,000 items in your table.

[sjs]

Not my first GUI code. I've done lots of web development in the past 15 years. Front and back. I've written an OS X app, several iOS apps including some universal ones, a few Android apps, a few webOS apps, and one Windows Phone 7 app. In a previous life I made games and utilities with Visual Basic and played around with Gtk+ in C (but quickly ran away).