Books for/about - ColdFusion

Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit (Web Application Construction Kit)

Publisher: Macromedia Press
Authors: Ben Forta Raymond Camden Leon Chalnick Angela C. Buraglia

ISBN: 0321223675
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Summary: BEN FORTA IS AMAZING
This man is amazing. I can feel his passion for ColdFusion when I read the book. I also have his Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes and it's the same way. I have a library of technical books, mostly software and programming language books but I don't have any that are as easy to understand and as fun to follow as the Forta books. Lastly, I love reading classical literature as well. Some of my favorites are Dante's Inferno and Milton's Paradise Lost (Tom Sawyer, Edgar Allen Poe, Dostoevsky...). I rank this ColdFusion book as one of the best pieces of literature that I've ever read. That's how good it is to me.

Summary: GREAT
This is the first book that I bought to start learning Cold Fusion(along with the Advanced Development), and it is by far one of the easiest books to read and make use of. Everything is written clearly, great explanations, great code samples each with tons of comments. Must read for any soon to be or already a CF developer.

Summary: The first time I ever enjoyed writing a data-driven site.
I have been designing web sites for over ten years, but working with data-base driven sites has always been a major pain in the butt. Not until I stumbled onto this program and this book. WOW - Should cover my feelings on this topic. Talk about simple and POWERFUL. Imagine this - instead of writing over 200 lines of HTML, writing 40 lines of Coldfusion, operating an entire site from one page and from a 170 pages down to 9 (no joke). If you're using MS Access or MySQL, it makes no difference, instant and simple. In less then a week I had the site up and running - bug free. Finding a proper hosting company that runs Coldfusion is somewhat of a pain, but it is completely worth it. If you have never made a data-driven site before, this will make the experience extremely pleasant and if you have written many, this will make you wish you knew about this before.

The book is as easy to read as the software is as easy to use.

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Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Application Development

Publisher: Macromedia Press
Authors: Ben Forta Sarge Sargent

ISBN: 0321292693
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Summary: Very advanced book
This book is oriented to developers with Coldfusion, XML, and Javascript experience. It addresses points that are not easy to find in usual developer books.

Summary: Very Good !
This is book is very good. It contain all advanced technics for a advanced developer.

Summary: A weighty and thorough instruction on all of ColdFusion's advanced features
Written by programmers for programmers, Ben Forta's sequel to his prior Macromedia Coldfusion Mx 7 Web Application Construction Kit provides a weighty and thorough instruction on all of ColdFusion's advanced features. From clustering solutions and building and integrating secure applications to understanding different security systems and extending ColdFusion capabilities with COM., C/C++ and more, nearly a thousand pages pack in extensive technical details and discussions of related technologies for maximum benefit.

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	ColdFusion MX Web Application Construction Kit, Fifth Edition Publisher: Macromedia Press Authors: Ben Forta Nate Weiss Leon Chalnick Angela C. Buraglia
ISBN: 0321125169 List Price: $54.99 Amazon Price: $38.49 Usually ships in 24 hours Buy this book from amazon.com or from amazon.co.uk	Avg Cusomer Rating: 5 Reviews: Summary: Excellent Source Book This book is great! It covers many aspects of Coldfusion Development which I had always wanted to know. Samples, Source Code and detailed explanations are excellent! A must have for any web developer interested in mastering their skill with Coldfusion. Summary: The best ColdFusion book out there... I have gone through numerous ColdFusion books. I came across this book, Macromedia ColdFusion MX Web Application Construction Kit Fifth Edition, from a reference from a friend. So far into it, I have to say it is superb in the manner of which it is written, and is easily understandable. All terms, as well as common myths (such as the hits per page) are explained in detail broadening your knowledge in general of the Internet and its capabilities. Databasing and the basics are covered in the earlier chapters, followed by lead-ins to ColdFusion, and ColdFusion itself. If you're strongly interested in learning CF inside and out, you should also buy the bundle Amazon has with the Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX Application Development Third Edition. Summary: Experience Coldfusion MX So you want to code in Coldfusion hey? Start here. Having had no previous experience in Coldfusion, I picked up this book and was creating user login's, search interfaces, dual purpose insert and update pages in no time. This book covers it all, and a whole lot more. Macromedia goes out of their way to anticipate "What the web can be", and Coldfusion delivers just that. This book by Ben Forta and Nate Weiss takes you step-by-step through a introduction to the Coldfusion environment, and then shows you how to unleash it's power. They instill excellent coding practices and the ultimate use of Coldfusion. Ben Forta makes it look easy, and it is. Together they have compiled an excellent manual/reference on the subject, and if you could have it delivered today, do so. Summary:

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Learning PHP 5

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: David Sklar

ISBN: 0596005601
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Summary: stuck at chapter 7
I bought an O'Reilly book to teach myself perl & it was great. I'm writing a review about this one because I'm frustrated. The first six chapters go by like a breeze for folks familiar with other programming languages (I use perl, mel, c, html, studio). well, that's not entirely true. I couldn't get my apache server to execute any of my php code (I'm on a new mac mini). I followed all the instructions in appendix A to no avail. Finally, I just uploaded my php scripts to a webserver & my code worked there. but that's super annoying because I have to upload my php file every time I want to test it (& sometimes my internet connection is slow). whatever. anyway: when I got to chapter 7 none of the examples worked anymore & it is extremely vague exactly how you're supposed to run some commands. for example: if you want to set up a database, you run the following command only one time:

CREATE TABLE dishes (
dish_id INT,
dish_name VARCHAR(255),
price DECIMAL(4,2),
is_spicy INT
)

but where do you run it from? also, the book relies heavily on using extensions that weren't installed in my version of php. additionally, I'm not sure if certain examples are just there to demonstrate what should work, or things that actually work. ie: this code is supposed to connect you to a database:

require 'DB.php';
$db = DB::connect('mysql://penguin:top^hat@db.example.com/restaurant');

is that actually supposed to work, or is it just an example? if it doesn't work for me (which it didn't), then I have to figure out what's wrong w/my system etc.

another frustrating this is the book recommends using several commands (like running system commands) that my webserver doesn't allow for security reasons. this problem should at least be addressed in the book. hopefully, I'm not just frustrated with php itself because several of my coworkers swear by it. but I've had more luck tracking down answers to very basic questions online than finding them in this book.

Summary: It's not good when a book for beginners has bugs in the code.
I'm sorry, but this book is just down right lousy. It was the very first book I ever picked up to teach me PHP. Back then, I had assumed that all books on technical matters would be as close to perfect as one could get. However, as I typed away at my initial pages, nothing was working right. There was constant errors. As a beginner, this is quite frustrating, because you just have no idea as to what you could be doing wrong. Well...as I looked online in the errata section for the book, there was so much information as to the corrections to the code, that I might as well have gone to the Errata section for free rather than waste my time and money. Now, with more experience, the bugs are so bluntly obvious as to what was wrong. Not like a typo, or a group of text missing. But I mean, obvious very "simplistic" code that was...just the wrong code. And this isn't very professional to have code that obvious be printed. It shows that it wasn't tested.

What's more: PHP5 is a huge evolution to the previous incarnations. While there's some basic coverage of things such as XML parsing, there's nothing about classes, or anything that makes PHP5 different. So, for the traditional procedural style of coding, there's far better books out there on the topic of PHP4, and there's far more valuable resources to get you up to speed in php5 that give you actual projects.

Summary: I liked...
Well written and organized. One thing I should mention is that there is a lot of hand holding as the book is really made for beginners.

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Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 with ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP: Training from the Source (Training from the Source)

Publisher: Macromedia Press
Authors: Jeffrey Bardzell

ISBN: 0321336259
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Summary: No online errata for this book
I'll say something good first. I found the author to be well skilled in explaining the concepts as well as the procedure when using Dreamweaver 8. Each chapter is written like a good lesson plan, and takes you through the book task by task. I usually have to read more than one book on a technology because what one author fails to explain adequately, another explains very well. That is the case with this book, But don't buy this book.

When I did run into a problem with the code in the book, I went to the website and found that there was no erata page or anything else for this book, the last update was for Dreamweaver MX or some previous version. So now I have to figure out on my own why the code in the book is giving me errors. Unforgivable.

I also read "Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8", and of course it also had errata, but it was fully corrected on the accompanying site. I did not have the problems with the server as the other reviewer did, because I didn't use this book for it after reading about his problems. I used the Foundation book to set up the PHP/MySQL, and it worked just fine, although I haven't tested it on the remote server yet...

Anyway if he's not going to support the book by listing errata on an accompanying site (that he references in the book), then don't bother buying the book.

Summary: wow.
i enjoyed this book. it opened my eyes to coldfusion, asp, and php web site design.

Summary: Disappointing At Best
The book was good up until the 10th Chapter in my opinion. I went through the excercises developing on a remote server running PHP/ MySQL. Up until the 10th chapter the author made several minor mistakes in the hand code to insert for both PHP and also in how to modify the existing SQL file to upload it to a remote database server via PHP My Admin. I must admit that researching and solving these mistakes on my own was a valuable learning experience. The real problem occurred starting with chapter 11. After uploading and testing my pages after each step as coached to by the author I began getting MySQL syntax error messages prompting me to consult the manual for my version of MySQL. I verified that my hosting company was running the same version of MySQL that the author demonstrated to those developing locally to install so I loaded the completed pages for the lesson from the CD and they would not open at all. At least the pages I was developing would load and had some functionality so that tells me that there was not even continuity between the completed pages on the CD and the text in the book. I think that is pretty inexcusable that nobody bothered to make sure that the completed projects worked in all development environments both locally and remote. I would have to say that the book is a complete waste of time for the PHP/ MySQL developer. To be fair I plan to upgrade my hosting account to include Cold Fusion so I can go through the book again following the Cold Fusion steps. Maybe they will work fine, one can only hope. Right now I can't recommend the book as it was extremely frustrating to put in all the time I did in the earlier chapters only to run into an insurmountable roadblock. One other thing of note is that the author invited readers to visit his website for updates and errata but when you go there you find that it has not been updated since 2004 and doesn't even mention Dreamweaver 8. It also says that the author's company is out of business so I must assume that Adobe/ Macromedia just copied the MX 2004 book (errors that it had and all) and just put a new jacket on it and changed the label on the CD and put it to market. I would have expected more from a $45.00 book that supports a $500.00 program. There is a book called "Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8" written by David Powers that has received high reviews that I am going to try next.

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Coldfusion MX Developer's Handbook

Publisher: Sybex
Authors: Raymond Camden Arman Danesh Hal Helms Guy Rish Emily Kim Shlomy Gantz Jen deHaan Peter deHaan

ISBN: 0782140297
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Summary: Excellent book
Good Reading. From a design point of view, one of the best. Great for any seasoned ColdFusion Developer who wants to implement best practices in their applications.I highly reccommend this book for ColdFusion Developers with approx. 1-2 years of experience.

Summary: Ready to Raise Your Skill Level?
Having been a full time ColdFusion Developer for nearly five years, I've had my fill of books that only offer the most shallow introductions to topics covered. This book is not one of those books - it's outstanding! There are thirteen coauthors and their combined efforts have produced an excellent resource any experienced developer should appreciate. Ramond Camden wrote the book's introduction, and, at its conclusion he wrote: "The mission of this book is to take you "outside the box" and provide the extra skills you need to be a successful ColdFusion developer in today's demanding environment." In my opinion, they fulfilled their mission!

There were numerous times over the two months I've had this book on hand that I found it very helpful. Some of the topics I particularly enjoyed so far address WDDX and XML, performance tuning, SQL and stored procedures and web services. The tips, processes and many detailed and truly useful examples have been a significant factor in elevating my skill level from the plateau it seemed I had been on.

Did I mention that the examples are actually useful? The problem I find with typical examples found in most books and online documentation is that they are so seldom of much use at all. I like examples that have some "meat on their bones," that relate to common tasks done in the real world, with comments about relevant issues born of experience.

The combined experience of the authors and the thoughtful presentation of the material is appreciated by this developer - thanks for an exceptional book, Sybex.

Summary: Playing catch-up on Cold Fusion's new features
Five years ago I was called upon to learn Cold Fusion over a weekend before starting a new assignment. I picked up Ben Forta's original Cold Fusion book and read three or four chapters on the way home on the train, picking up the bulk of what I needed to know to do my work in a few short hours. I've done a lot of work with Cold Fusion since then, and used that book to pick up many of the finer points of the craft, including the CFPOP and CFMAIL tags which I used to build a web-based e-mail service.

The web has changed a lot since 1998, and so has Cold Fusion. That book served me well, but with all the technological advances since its publication, I needed a new book that offered coverage of all the new features in Cold Fusion, from support for Flash and XML to invocation of web services and next-generation Cold Fusion components.

Cold Fusion MX Developer's Handbook fits the bill. It provides robust coverage of Cold Fusion's basic long-standing features, but also goes into more detail about maturing technologies like WDDX and Flash Remoting and their place in Cold Fusion applications. Many of the original tags had evolved significantly since I last made use of them, and this book offers thorough explanations of their new features. When it comes to new technologies like WML and Web Services, the book includes explanations not only of Cold Fusion's support for these technologies but also overviews describing their capabilities in general terms. (WAP/WML, for example, doesn't have specialized Cold Fusion support, but the chapter on "Working with WAP and WML Clients" not only explains the intricacies of a WML application but also how to use standard Cold Fusion tags to determine whether a client is WML-capable based on request headers and set the Content-Type appropriately for the response.)

I've definitely found the right book to help me "catch-up" on Cold Fusion, but the book would still be great for neophytes seeking to learn Cold Fusion from the ground up, as well as experienced Cold Fusion developers who need a reference to the product's many new features.

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Programming ColdFusion MX, 2nd Edition

Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Authors: Rob Brooks-Bilson

ISBN: 0596003803
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Summary: Posted on behalf of the Salt Lake ColdFusion User's Group (SLCFUG)
-as read by member Kelly Young
This book assumes some advanced knowledge of coding techniques and advanced Web-based topics, which is fine for its targeted audience. Use of SQL examples I found very useful. I very much like the appendix references Tag Reference, Function Reference, Cold Fusion Resources. The author delivers a well-structured, systematic reference to ColdFusion; just what a developer needs to get the job done, also a handy reference to keep near the keyboard.

Summary: Incredible Coldfusion book for Beginners or Pros
This book seems to bring a whole new perspective on Coldfusion. I have been programming CF for approximately 2-3 years, and this just opened up more doors of CF functionality. For example it displays one of the best "homegrown" login examples I have ever seen. It also really goes into great detail on more advanced topics that other books seems to skate around. Once again, an incredible book for beginners and pros!!!

Summary: Excell Adv. technical content, not instructional or complete
Overall the better of the dozen or more books on coldfusion mx in terms of development-quality reference material.

Almost all of the other books on the topic do a poor job of explaining ColdFusion MX in terms of an instructional blow-by-blow get from step 1 to step 30; where 1 is an architectural overview and by step 30 you have been "instructed" on the development of a featurable product.

This book assumes some advanced knowledge of coding technicques and advanced Web-based topics, which is fine for its targeted audience. It is not a complete Bible or Courseware-level instructional offering, by any stretch of the imagination.

Many CF MX offerings are too lite. This one is certainly not lite - it is rich in content that it does showcase, but I was disappointed when they got into the coding examples for T-SQL, but fell short by ending the topic prematurely. It also failed to give real-world examples of how SQL databases can be created, implemented and administered in a virtual capacity - as is the case with a lot of company's who do not host their own servers and do not Co-locate them either. Many, including ourselves, use a datacenter that offers industrial-grade servers that we share, and where the licensing doesn;t require me to sell my shild on the black market or a second-mortgage to pay for it

Many CF/DW texts fill their weak offerings in those subject areas (often cursory at best) with other Macromedia Applications, specifically Flash - and even these are cursory categories at best. If you don't grasp the underlying mechanics of how CF MX works, and how DW MX interfaces directly as an excellent WebDev toolset, Flash becomes so far outside the box as to make that content worthless as a resource.

All of these Macromedia offerings have their own (several hundred page) books devoted to them intimately, and still often fall short. Very few printed offerings (including this one) explicitly discuss combining DW MX for advanced design work (read: uber graphics, layout AND Database / e-commerce development/interaction...and I don't mean Access), along with DW MX's interfacing technologically with ColdFusion MX and T-SQL / SQL Server. My investigation required 2 resources: DreamWeaver MX Advanced (Towers, et al., PeachPit) and ColdFusion MX with DreamWeaver MX (David Golden, New Riders) - these were overall the "best" offerings I could find for this subject matter, although once under my belt, I will most certainly be looking forward to utilizing this book.

Hopefully someone will put all of the respective pieces together ( CF MX / DW MX / Database integration / e-commerce development). There are few (if any) that do so, or do it well - the material is just too broad and deep for most audiences. Macromedia's Web site and Developer Forums continue to be the goods in terms of supporting this - the best quality materials I have seen in a software development product to date, and a far superior approach from a content-finding and "usability" standpoint. Still difficult to find good server-level DW/CF/DB materails, with a focus on e-Commerce, though - even on the manufacturer's website. Macromedia is still tops in my book, though. Microsoft take note: If you want people to use your products and do it effectively to saturate the market and develop your IT Development base, you need to make your product offerings rich but workable at a basic level AND you must post up real-world examples that can be used as templates and starting points for that educational process - not just White papers and written (non-technical) case studies... Macromedia has this nailed, and it shows through the support and uber-cool feature sets, and in its real-world implementation guide by professional users of the technology that run it, use it, help develop it and teach it openly. Technology isn't supposed to a technical or administrative nightmare - which is sort of how I feel about Visual.Net at the moment. Adobe could also take a cue from Macromedia - it has probably the closest suite of product offerings that are usable, rish, and increibly flexible - and Version Cue is cool, but alas, GoLive sucks when it comes to DB integration and there is no Server infrastructure (or product available) to support scalability the way Macromedia's products do. If Adobe ever gets their ducks in a row in this regard, they will directly be a competitive force to be reckoned with, but until then ColdFusion MX reigns supreme, and if you know what you're doing, this book will pave the way to glory.

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ColdFusion MX Bible

Publisher: Wiley
Authors: Adam Phillip Churvis Hal Helms Charlie Arehart David Churvis

ISBN: 0764546228
List Price: $49.99
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Summary: This is NOT the MX 'bible'
I don't understand why this book has so many positive reviews. I have been a full-time coldfusion developer for 6 years. Our team of 4 coldfusion developers have the Ben Forta for CF 4.5 and this book.

We find this book fairly useless as a coldfusion reference. Sure it covers the procedures of web development in coldfusion, SQL, and related technologies, but you can't rely on it as a coldfusion reference once you've mastered the basics. Functions and Tags seem to either be poorly indexed, poorly detailed, or just plain missing from the book altogether. This would not be such a crime if the book had not been titled the 'bible'

We kept having to go back to our Ben Forta CF 4.5 book to look things up, even though we are running CF 6.1. We are going to have to go out and get another MX book for the newer coldfusion functions and features; this one doesn't cut it.

Save yourself time and money by getting a good reference on CF MX, and if you need help with SQL and other technologies buy a good SQL reference, etc.

Summary: First CFMX reference I reach for...
...and usually the last. I've purchased a number of ColdFusion books in the past few years, and always loved the Mastering series for CF 4.5 and 5. When MX came out, I bought both Mastering and the Bible, but truthfully, I barely ever open the Mastering book. Everything I've ever needed to learn has been in the CFMX Bible.

Adam Churvis and crew really know their stuff. Clear, concise discussions on important topics, intelligible diagrams and an index that actually helps you find topics you're looking for quickly! How long has it been since a good technical manual had one of those?!?!

For me, CFCs were something that I was going to get around to eventually, but never seemed to get the time to mess with them, but when I finally did, the Bible taught me everything I needed to know to start building them. The discussion on Web Services finally explained to me what all the hype about them is, and I actually had fun building the sample web service application and learning about XSLT.

I recommend the ColdFusion MX Bible highly, and suggest you keep an eye out for anything else Adam and David Churvis author.

Summary: A No-Nonsense Approach to Mastering the Product:
Of all the things I COULD say in praise of this book, the single most important feature is that you can actually LEARN from it. The book presents a consistent style and presentation, and is thus an excellent learning tool. There is no "wasted space", discussing irrelevant subjects; no "beating around the bush" getting to the true meat. Here, you know the authors care about the material, and imparting it to YOU, in the most straight-forward way possible. It also is immediately apparent that the authors live in the "trenches" of daily professional experience with all of the product lines.....CF coding, databases, performance issues, product nuances, and the like. There is no substitute for this level of insight; here, you are gaining REAL-WORLD perspective that is SO hard to obtain otherwise. I will stop here, but you get the point....Mr. Churvis, et al, have produced a publication that honors the learning experience. If you want/need to move your web development knowledge UP several notches, this book is one of the best investments you can make.

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