Rating: 
Summary: Useful, but unrefined
Review: Everyone below me has already pointed out the number of errors and typos in this book. I can deal with the occasional typo, but some -- such as a table of attributes for the CFGRID tag misspelling "ROWHEADERS" as "ROWHEADER", or code listing 28.5 replacing random letters with double-quotes -- are unforgivable and confusing to say the least. Some chapters are also placed apparently out-of-order, or present techniques without presenting any useful applications for them. Chapter 25 outlines how to build an online commerce application but does so entirely with custom tags, an advanced feature that goes entirely unexplained in this book. Similarly, Chapter 22 explains how arrays and structures are created in ColdFusion, but no examples of how these might be used effectively are given -- because until you read about application templates in Chapter 26, there are no such uses. Nevertheless, this is a great source of information for people getting started with ColdFusion and who want to learn how to use the various features as quickly as possible. Just be forewarned that if you use this book as your *only* source, you'll be undereducated at best and confused at worst. Allaire's online documentation, which comes installed with Studio 4.0, is essential for filling in the gaps this book leaves behind.
Rating:
Summary: Great, but needs chapter on creating login interfaces
Review: I decided to look at the reviews at Amazon.com just out of curiosity and found some suprisingly low marks (1, 2 stars), but I actually found those reviews helpful. I have not yet finished the whole book but was dismayed to hear that the first part seems much better than the second. I think this book is popular because the first part is so good at getting new users up to speed with ColdFusion, and for that reason alone I think it deserves 4 stars. So many programming books don't spend 25% of the time Ben Forta does on explaining what a tool does and how it does it. Still, I do think the book would benefit from a chapter or two on common problems new developers face: Designing a login interface, design issues such as using CFINCLUDE vs. frames for site consistency, custom tags *in detail*, etc. I came at the book from the relational database side and still learned new things about databases, but I was surprised at not being able to find guidelines and examples for setting up a site login page and so on. I quickly scanned the Advanced ColdFusion 4.0 Development book by Forta and didn't see much about login frameworks there either. Otherwise, I think the book so far is great.
Rating: 
Summary: Garbage!
Review: If you interested in learning Cold Fusion, don't waste your time or money on this book. Difficult to understand and poorly written. What a dissapointment!...
Rating: 
Summary: An average book
Review: I have read through much of this book, and I was quite dissapointed. In my opinion, it's not worth the avg review of 4.5 stars. The book starts with introductory chapters, that's fine for new users. But after that, it continues to follow the path of giving out code by code, with little exlaination of the real world requirements and the implemented mechanism. The book lack a chapter for CFML language (types, functions, etc), which should be placed in the beginning part and should be a base for further learning. The chapters on application framework and session variables is not even as clear as Allair's online documentation, which is brief itself. The chapter about custom tag should be place on this book, not on "advanced" one, as modular design should be used in the first place, and not many designers/developers have time to read both books before starting their projects. This book contains some good parts though.
Rating: 
Summary: This book rocks.
Review: I needed to get a web-database solution up with a tight deadline. I was a newbie to web-development although I had VC++, C experience prior to this. After searching extensively through web-database discussion forums and considering suggestions from people involved in rapid applications development for the web, I chose ColdFusion as my development tool. And the search for the perfect book began. And with this book it ended. This book will hold your hand and walk you through the creation of fantastic web solutions with all the functionality that you can dream of. (A few topics such as performance tuning, advanced security etc. are only covered in the Advanced version of this book.) What I really liked about Ben's style is his real-world approach and his ability to cater to all sorts of novices. This book will give a reasonable primer on databases and will show you how to create your own databases in Access and then use ColdFusion to display the data on the web. It will show you how to use ColdFusion, forms and SQL statements to execute awesomely powerful database queries. It will show you how to use more complex SQL querying techniques. It will show you how to use ColdFusion in the way it is supposed to be used. It will show you how to use the treasure-trove of ColdFusion tags that will make web-development child's play. It is absolutely loaded with code samples and detailed explanations of all the code so that you will be able to very quickly modify them for your own purposes. If you are wondering about how long it will take you get up and running if you have hardly any development experience - if you buy absolutely no other books aside from this one, read it carefully and modify the sample code for your own purposes, you will be able to develop a web-solution that integrates with a backend database, executes powerful queries, enables updates, adds e-mail functionality, login security, ensures design consistency and ensures client-state persistency, within a week. Give yourself an additional week and you will be able to develop complete shopping cart applications and whatever else you can dream up. And no, I am not exaggerating. Web-development is no rocket science, ColdFusion will show you why. It has brought beaming smiles to the faces of thousands of developers, novices as well as gurus, and if you buy this book, you too will be grinnning from ear-to-ear. Ben, thanks a zillion!
Rating:
Summary: One of the most useless books I've had
Review: I can't believe this book has got such good ratings. It's horrible. It has some useful examples I'll admit, but the appendix is useless. Trying to find detailed information about how a tag works? Don't bother looking in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Everything I ever needed to know about Cold Fusion ...
Review: ... I learned from Ben Forta. OK - If your going to learn or do any sort of reading into Cold Fusion, don't waste your time, get a Ben Forta book okay? I have read all the books on CF, and his are the most thorough, practical, and easiest to understand. The "proof is in the pudding" as they say, in that I still use this book nearly weekly as a reference tool, even though I have the updated versions. I simply know where everything is, because I have used it so much. Thanks Ben - we love ya' . . .
Rating: 
Summary: A Good Book, but...
Review: First of all, this book is about Cold Fusion 4.0 and the current version of Cold Fusion is 5. So, an update would be nice since there are significant differences between 4.0 and 4.5.1 and between 4.5.1 and 5. This is a great book for beginners needing to find basic information and nothing too in depth. I found some topics to be simply glossed-over and some left out completely. For example, Allaire/Macromedia apparently recommend using CFLOCK to lock application and server variables, but this really is never mentioned in either this book (recommended by Macromedia) or the Cold Fusion documentation. Why? Discussion of Client Variables was skimpy, and the book is filled with errors. I would like to see the tag guide in the back organized alphabetically instead of by type of tag, so that I don't have to go to the index to find a tag's page number first. In general, I have used this book as a handy reference to find basic information and to supplement the documentation that comes with Cold Fusion, but I have gone to Allaire's forum website for more in depth advice and support.
Rating:
Summary: Good
Review: This book is good for beginner. There is many example in this book.
Rating:
Summary: Worth sharing with your friends
Review: I've been working with this for several months, and consider it the best technical book I've read on any subject in a long time. Succinct reviews of HTML and Relational Databases, and away you go from there. I can't imagine working with ColdFusion database-driven websites without this book.
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