Customer Reviews

Adobe ColdFusion

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

One thing has beleaguered the ColdFusion ecosystem: a lack of deep knowledge. This book is a welcome palliative to that. If you're a serious ColdFusion programmer, buying this book should be a no-brainer.

If you are past the introductory phase of learning ColdFusion, then GET THIS BOOK.

The whole book is full of info to get one-up-to-speed quickly with current-day practices in ColdFusion programming.
I'm particularly impressed with Part 6, which talks about 9, and gives chapters on 8 ColdFusion frameworks.
Just for that overview and introduction, the book is well worth it.

And yes, I've just received my misprinted book; apparently it skipped the recall.
Be sure to ask before you buy, if you want to immediately be able to read Chapter 7 "Image Processing in ColdFusion".

Hopefully I'll be able to get some sort of remediation from the publisher for that missing chapter...
A great book, even those with the missing chapter.

I thought this was a solid piece of work, pulling in a number of great Fusion Authority articles and adding a few new ones where necessary to fill holes. Each section presents a couple of different articles within a related topic and the end result is quite good. People who have been using CF for years may not find much in the Fundamentals section, but maybe the introduction to OOP gives them info they haven't seen or maybe they're still relying on Application.cfm and the overview of Application.cfc may be valuable. Users who are coming from an OOP background might find the Frameworks section useful, with discussions of Coldspring, Reactor, Model-Glue, Mach-II, and more. Including resources on server performance, document manipulation, service integration, and development tools really makes this book useful for nearly any level of CF developer. Last but not least, the book is well assembled and well organized, and the editors have done a good job of ensuring that magazine content was edited to flow in the book format, covering topics from several angles without a lot of content overlap across chapters.

If you are looking for a thorough introduction to CF, this is not the book. Just as the title says, this book offers "Clear and Concise Concepts" and it does that well.

Every good CF developer most likely has a couple of sets of Ben Forta monitor stands. For the uninitiated, that's where old versions of the CFWACK go to die.

If you're just getting into CF9, or if you're serious about getting serious about CF, then you should definitely own the latest 3 volumes of the CFWACK. That's a no-brainer.

After that, the very next book you should buy is this one. Period. As a senior software architect with 13 years of ColdFusion development behind me (that's like 32 1/2 in developer years), I would recommend this book to any CF dev who has the basics of CF down. This is not CF 101... that's what CFWACK Volume 1 is for. This is real world ColdFusion, with articles by the best of the best on topics that will be important to get a handle on once you've knocked out a couple of admin tools and a shopping cart.

I actually bought the Kindle version of this, and the availability of this anthology in ebook form is another big plus for me. I also have CFWACK vols. 1-3 on Kindle as well. Being able to carry these critical reference books around on my iPad is amazing. I can bookmark and highlight things that are pertinent to the tasks at hand for easy reference later ( sorry 3M, I've kicked the sticky note bookmark habit ). It also makes it easier on my back, because those CFWACKs get a little unwieldy to tote around.

Unfortunately, the iPad probaby won't make a very good monitor stand once CFX WACK hits the shelves, but I think the phone company will provide adequate replacements, at least until they realize that no one under 80 uses phone books any more.

The book is on recall - chapter 7 is completely missing! The publisher will put you on a list - when they reprint the corrected edition they replace the defective edition - that will be months away.

Well Months have passed and I took the advice of other commentators and I will review the contents, not the lack thereof. It was unfair for me to use the rating system to bash the book when it was just a computer glitch that dropped the phantom chapter.

The book is a great addition to any CFML library, it is stuffed with real world scenarios of cfml problem solving, best practices and so much more. Highly informative with nearly endless examples of code, before and after.

I rate it a good buy - especially for the professional CFML webmasters, and wannabees like me.