Adobe ColdFusion [Paperback]

Mike Dinowitz (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 30, 2010 | ISBN-10: 1430272155 | ISBN-13: 978-1430272151 | Edition: 1

Adobe ColdFusion remains one of today’s significant Web services tools and frameworks, which stands poised to become even more important as a possible primary tool for Cloud development as well. As important as ColdFusion is and continues to become, we thought it might be a good idea to tap the leading authority on Cold Fusion, the Fusion Authority. We asked this community to culminate many of the most important issues in their developer and user experiences into one single volume - An anthology of the most up to date technical articles published in the Fusion Authority Quarterly Updates. In it, you’ll get the following:

• The best and brightest ColdFusion expertise available today, from inside and outside of Adobe.
• Most up to date content with latest releases of ColdFusion available.
• Also includes case studies and even instances where ColdFusion is used in Cloud-based development.

Rather than trying to be a soup-to-nuts style book that has every single topic, including those that people have learned already, we take specific items of interest and explain them so that people can take it and hit the floor running rather than wait until the entire book has been read. This is not ColdFusion from zero to superstar in 1000 pages.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael Dinowitz is the primary author and has been using ColdFusion since the original beta. He's well known for taking complex topics and explaining them in simple terms without losing their full power. Other authors are also selected from the top tier of the ColdFusion development world.

Judith Dinowitz is the master editor-in-chief of the House of Fusion magazines and journals, where she enjoys serving up ColdFusion and Flex goodness on a weekly and quarterly basis.

Product Details

• Paperback: 700 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (April 30, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1430272155
• ISBN-13: 978-1430272151
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #409,166 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A compelling compendium of top contributions from over 30 authors, May 10, 2010

By 

Charles Arehart (Alpharetta GA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe ColdFusion (Paperback)

The book's title says it all: what you'll find in this anthology is a well-organized and compelling compendium of top contributions from over 30 authors on some of the latest and greatest developments as well as classic fundamentals in ColdFusion. The chapters appeared first as articles in the FusionAuthority Quarterly Update (FAQU), a high-quality journal that some readers here will know has served the CF community both in print (until recently) and always online by subscription.

** Not just a rehash, and updated for CF9:

"The Anthology" (as I suspect it may come to be known) offers a great cross-section of FAQU articles, edited and re-purposed for book format and presented in well-organized sections (more on the valuable editing later). Of course the book form will be great for reaching those who maybe never knew of the magazine.

But even though I'd read most of the articles in their original journal issues, it's still a compelling reprisal of so many great ones. More important, many have been updated to reflect changes in CF since their original writing.

Indeed, from the first chapter on you'll find that many of the articles refer to recent development in ColdFusion 9, and of course many refer to CF 8 (which some are still only now moving to). Still, many topics in CF are foundational, such that what's true a couple (or even a few) years ago is just as valuable now.

** A broad range of intermediate/advanced topics:

A quick scan by prospective readers of the Amazon preview of the complete Table of Contents will show that this is far from a beginner book. While it does start with fundamentals, it's *not* "how to do CFOUTPUT/CFQUERY", nor how to define datasources, etc. Far from it! Such bare essentials of CF are *assumed*.

Instead the first several chapters focus on effective use of CFC features (and a later section covers OOP). This is not "the idiot's guide to CF"!

Still, CF is a rich language and platform, and even those with years of experience can get bogged down leveraging only a subset of its functionality. This book can help change that. The remaining chapters range from easy-to-understand things like the compelling features to create PDFs, images, etc to subsequent sections on broader/deeper topics related to tuning, integration, frameworks, user interface, and all-important development tools.

Any CF developer who's gotten past the bare essentials would do very well to soak up the vast array of tips and traps shared by so many developers here.

** Presented from many perspectives, but with a unifying hand:

Indeed, it's great to have such a variety of knowledge and experience presented here, since In the CF world there are many ways to achieve a goal and certainly different opinions as well.

That said, many such anthologies often suffer precisely *because* of having so many authors. That should be less of an issue here. I can attest to this as one of the contributors (as well as a regular back-page columnist in the FAQU journal.)

All the writing here (and in the journal) has been edited under the firm but gentle guiding hand of editor Judith Dinowitz as well as her husband Michael and their team of technical editors (and those of the publisher). This book seems a fitting capstone to all they've done under the guise of FusionAuthority, helping advance the skills of so many CFers. You can learn more about all the contributors to and editors of the book in bios offered after the table of contents, again viewable in the preview here. (And in the interest of disclosure, the contributors have no financial share in sales of this book, so I offer my review here sincerely and to help readers.)

I recommend the Anthology to any CFer interested in advancing their skills in many ways.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Great CF book - will keep this on my shelf, June 29, 2010

By 

Ryan Stille (Nebraska) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe ColdFusion (Paperback)

We have a new ColdFusion book! The CF community has not been blessed with an abundency of printed materials, so I was excited when I heard this book was coming out. Adobe ColdFusion Anthology is a compilation of Fusion Authority Quarterly Update articles. FAQU is a great publication that has contributions from many smart ColdFusion developers.

This book is 476 and covers a lot of interesting things. I've been using CFCs for years but I learned some new things in Michael Dinowitz's chapters on Components. There are articles on all the major frameworks, there is even one on the new FW/1 framework.

Pete Freitag has a good article on image processing that also covers creating your own captchas. Did you know ColdFusion can read EXIF data?!

I also found John Mason's article on BlazeDS interesting since I've never used BlazeDS before. I've always been confused about the differences between BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services, and this article helped clear some of that up.

This isn't a beginner book, I'll bet every CF developer out there could learn a few things from this book. Also they've done a nice job with the editing, everything is clearly explained.

I saw that one of these reviews said that chapter 7 was missing from the book. This is NOT the case with the copy I received, they must have gotten the updated copies out very quickly.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Cream Of The Crop, May 18, 2010

By 

Clark V. Valberg (New York, New York United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe ColdFusion (Paperback)

When it comes to technical books of any kind, rarely can one find a single volume that provides the breadth of specific knowledge and expertise found here.
The Adobe ColdFusion Anthology taps ColdFusion's brightest minds to provide a thorough and insightful assortment of practical problems and solutions. The menu of topics presented are both broad enough to satisfy the interests of the novice, yet covered deeply enough to provide novel insights to the most seasoned expert. Reading this book is like having forty-two separate one-on-one training sessions with the smartest people in the room at ColdFusion development shops around the world.