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Summary: The Bible for ColdFusion
Review: This is the absolute best book on the market for ColdFusion Development. I am a certified coldFusion developer and have found this book to be in-valuable! I would have paid 10 times the price for this book if I would have known how much information was within this book! No other book compares.
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Summary: The First CF Testament
Review: This book is a must have for any CF developer regardless of experience. It covers all the basics and it's written by Ben Forta, so you know the content is correct. I manage the LouLexCFUG and I recommend this book to all of my group members!
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Summary: Excellent Reading
Review: My tattered copy of this book is long overdue for an upgrade. This has been an excellent source of information and has been since I bought it. The only problems I have found with it is the lack of content about arrays and structures. Defintely a must have for any developers CF library.
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Summary: Use this book to learn CF
Review: To find good books on CF is difficult. Ben Forta however has published two of the best. This book takes you from installing CF to learning basic SQL, to using CF compitently. I really enjoyed the appendixes in this book which give you not only tag and function references, but good examples alonf with a description.Ben does a great job in getting even a db newbie up-and-running with CF. It seems most languages or programs have that one "classic" book that everyone uses, this is it. If you want to learn CF you must buy this book. No CF library can exist without this reference tool. I am using CF 4.5 currently, and I still use this book as a reference.
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Summary: The Ultimate Guide
Review: H2G2 has nothing on this. This is the ultimate guide to CF. Ben Forta rules!
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Summary: Well Written and Helpful
Review: This book really helped me out a lot. I purchase it on the advice of a friend (who is a CF programmer by trade) and I was never more pleasantly surprized. The book started by thoroughly explaining the basics of the WWW and carefully moved me through setting up databases and webpages. I could not be happier with the way this book was written!
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Summary: Almost as good as the class.
Review: I thought that this book did a pretty good job of teaching you a fairly straight forward markup language (CFML). By the time you finish this book, you should have a good working knowledge of ColdFusion. I would sugget purchasing this book if you cannot afford to take the class, or want a refresher of the class. Having taken the class and reading the book I would have to say all of the material in this book is exactly what's covered in the class. If you want a solid start in ColdFusion, this book probably won't disappoint you.
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Summary: Too complex
Review: As the other readers noted in their reviews, I feel this book starts off great and become complex with a lack of explination of basic concepts. The chapter on SQL statments utilzes a utility called MS Query to explain SQL concepts,but, it does not include a copy of this utility with the book. I tried to recreate the examples utilizing the query tools located within Access but I was unsuccessful. I plan on returning this book and purchasing the SAMS reference manual.
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Summary: Strictly Speaking - A Big Disappointment
Review: This book is popular simply because there were really no CF books around at that time. Obviously, Mr. Ben Forta is a very experienced and advanced CF developer himself but frankly he does not really want to teach readers the core of this powerful and easy-to-use tool, and doesn't want his readers to have a smooth learning curve. I'm saying this because: 1. Many viewers agree that the first half of the book is better than the second half. That's because the first half only teaches the most basic concept and coding. And Mr. Ben Forta does not bother to repeat these simplest concept and coding over and over again for several times. That's why this book is so thick. 2. The second half - When it comes to the really usefulness of this wonderful tool, Mr. Ben Forta just does not explain thoroughly and does not provide the complete code in many of his examples, leaving lots of problems for readers to figure out by themselves. The CD does have the samples of these codes but most of the samples don't even work, and have different coding from the book. 3. The writing logic - If Mr. Ben Forta can write the first part well, there is no reason he cannot do the same job for the latter part. Because authors normally use the same logic to write one book. All in all, an average book should at least teach reasonably well. Having been frustrated by so many technical books, readers tend to lower the standards for an average or a reasonably good technical book. But I think we can all agree to one thing - A good technical book should be written with not only rich knowledge, good organization but also conscientiousness. An example of such conscientious author is Mr. Robert Vieira, the author of Professional SQL Server 7.0.
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Summary: Got me rolling, but I need more...
Review: For someone who knows HTML, but didn't know anything about ColdFusion, this book helped me get started quickly. The explanations were easy to follow, and the numerous examples helped solidify the concepts. The book doesn't assume that you know much about other important topics like programming structure, SQL and databases, so it seems geared for those who, like me, are just beginning to expand beyond static HTML. There are some errors in the text and typos in the code, as others have discussed at great length in their reviews, but I didn't encounter any that hindered me in the learning process. I agree with others that the latter parts of the book (on applications and sessions) are a little more difficult to follow, and in the examples he starts using code that isn't thoroughly explained, if at all, in previous chapters (e.g. the "IIF" statement, which is only explained in the appendix). In my opinion, one topic I wish this book had covered is an example of good design architecture. Page 371 has some tips for preventing problems in coding that are well worth following, but he provides little guidance, in this book at least, on how to accomplish them. Suggestions 4 ("Write code with reuse in mind") and 9 ("Set coding standards") are very important for anyone wanting to deploy more than an extremely simple application. But how do I practice what he's preaching? In other words, how should pieces of code be broken up so that it is more manageable and less task-specific? What are some good standards and specifications to set? I hope these are covered in his second book, which I haven't read. But for those who are interested in learning more about these topics, I encourage you to visit..., where some veteran coders have outlined standards and specifications for writing code that is easy to manage, debug and reuse.
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