Programming ColdFusion MX: Creating Dynamic Web Applications 2nd Edition

I have new responsibilties at work that require coding web based projects in ColdFusion. I've done my share of web based programming, but never with ColdFusion. I bought this book as a code and syntax reference and to help me get over the learning "hump."This book has been VERY helpful. ColdFusion is able to do so many things that the "old school" languages never dreamed of. That said, this book has been very easy to navigate, and I've been able to jump right to the code explanations and examples I need. I don't read code references cover-to-cover, I just refer to them as needed, and this book so far has been perfect. Easy to understand, easy to navigate, and with sufficient code samples. It even oiled my rusty brain on complex SQL syntax.This is going on my bookshelf next to my JavaScript Bible! ;-)

While it seems only adobe makes coldfusion books of any quality anymore this is still the reference book to get. this book combined with the adobe livedocs and you should have no problems easily finding most of your coldfusion programming answers.though you can buy the latest Web Application Constuction kits, the are good, but honestly much of them are the same book only updated, so once you have one you really have them all, plus the latest books are half online anyway so your better off with the older ones, like mx7.however for a solid reference you just can't beat orielly..if only we could get them to release another coldfusion book...

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 itMany 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.

I love O'Reilly books when I know a language and need a desktop reference. I have owned the JavaScript Definitive Resource and the PERL "Camel" book for many years.However, if you are just starting out with Cold Fusion programming, get ColdFusion MX Bible or ColdFusion Programming instead. But remember to come back for this book when you are ready for having a good reference book.

It’s 2020 and this author was unknown to me but this book is still awesome - just look at what was deprecated and added since this version of ColdFusion and you have a winner!! Maybe Rob will do a 2020 update :)

I had bought many other books and they didn't help me at all. this book is great, knows how to teach beginner. it helped a lot.

This is my fourth CFMX book. That isn't to say that the first three were all rubbish, although one of them was! (ISBN 0735712719, which I quickly sent back; read my review at [...] and you'll see why)I quickly moved on to ISBN 0321158024, which was a good, relatively cheap, get-you-started primer. However after a month or two I ran out of road with this as a CF reference work and I subsequently acquired ISBN 0072225564. Now there's nothing really wrong with this book, it's just that I still couldn't get the answers I wanted. After reading a load of reviews I acquired Rob's book the other day.Now it may have over 1100 pages and look rather anorak-y but, trust me, it's brilliant and the writing style makes it easy to read. The author is clearly evangelical about CF, and if you haven't yet decided on a web development tool, after reading the first Chapter or so of this you'll ignore ASP, PHP and the rest.I could give a dozen reasons why this is a book for beginners upwards, but just one example of how to do things quicker and simpler than the other books would be how to display a table of data with a header and alternately banded rows for greater legibility. Go to [...] and read example 11.2 on p314. If it looks like Greek to you, then it won't after you've read the early stuff or have played around with CFMX for longer than a week or three.The bad news about this book is that I now want to re-code ALL my earlier stuff. The good news is that the lines of code are shrinking before my eyes, they're more decipherable, and probably faster.OK, so I'll probably never use 30-50% of this book, but we're all different, and that 30-50% may well be the bits you need.