In general, I've been very pleased with this book. It covers the useful bits of the AIR API without going overboard. It has lots of great examples. I'm not a huge fan of Visual Quickstart guides, but this one hits a sweet spot.

Larry Ullman's easy informal writing style disguises a highly focussed, readable, condensed and very lucid approach. He manages to put in a paragraph or sentence what other authors take a chapter or two and then explains it much better.
This book gets you up, working with and understanding AIR very quickly. You may have to break off and learn a bit more JavaScript or IDE's but that is easily done. I had never heard of the runtime property of a window so read up about it even though it was not really necessary to do so.
He does introduce you to Aptana Studio which is an excellent IDE for the purpose .Its free and does a huge amount of donkey work leaving you to do the fun part. Here too you may have to break off and learn a bit about Aptana.
A handy web designer will find this book very interesting and useful. In short order you can write your own APIs.
I should think that because of it layout and focus on AIR an experienced professional would scream through the book in no time but find it invaluable in showing him/her what AIR is all about and how to work with it.
I have several of Larry Ullman's books and find he usually explains thing far better, more succinctly and lucidly than many more erudite tomes with many editions (which I also have).

As an experienced desktop programmer (and some web design) I have been looking for the "best" (easiest) way to write programs that are cross platform (PC, MAC, & Linux). A must for me is the ability to write and read files! I have read most of the book while in a bookstore and I was very impressed with all it has to offer. I just ordered it and I have already written my first program in 5 minutes! Ok, it was "hello world". I am using Dreamweaver CS3 (or any editor) and javascript and ajax. Low cost programming with the Adobe AIR runtime. This is the best and newest technology I have seen in years. Larry writing style makes this look easy and it is!!