flex programming language question and books for a newbie?

[h_c]

Hello All,

I am a complete newbie to Flex. There was a Flex developer in our
project who left so that work has come to me. My background is mainly
C,C++ with some HTML, JavaScript.

I have a couple of questions and would appreciate if someone could
respond to them.

I am going through the Adobe Videotrainings at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/videotraining/
to get acquainted with Flex. In addition, I am using books like
Wiley Adobe Flex 3.0 for Dummies
getting_started_with_Flex3 available at Adobe Video training link
APress Foundation ActionScript 3.0 with Flash CS3 and Flex

Any other books which are recommended?

The Flex application I am expected to maintain and enhance prints out
reports in PDF format which we need to be in MS-Word format. I have
looked at the source for the application and see the below lines in
one file

<cfdocument format="pdf" filename="#report_filename_format#"
orientation="landscape"
pagetype="legal">

Is there a way to do it in the program? I understand the format
attribute can take only "PDF" or "flashpaper" as values.

Can someone please clarify?

Thanks a lot.

[Peter Cowling]

I never use coldfusion. format in this case, though, means the output format. I know you can use a source (cannot remember what the property is called exactly) of .doc and quite a few others in cf9 - not sure about earlier versions, as I was just looking at this the other day.

EDIT
the books question comes up alot. My take is do not bother with them. With your background I would look for online documents that cover events, and the flex component lifecycle.