Customer Reviews

Business Intelligence with Coldfusion with CDROM (E-Business)

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As an experienced developer who's somewhat new to Cold Fusion, I had hoped that this book would provide some new and useful ideas and source code. Boy was I wrong.

According to the book review, "This book is geared toward the experienced application developer who might be new to ColdFusion." Yet, in the introduction, the book says "This book assumes no prior knowledge of Coldfusion development". That's for sure!

The first four chapters are a beginner's introduction to project management. Skip if you have ever been on a software project team or taken a class in project management.

Chapters five through nine are a rehash of the Cold Fusion manual. Skip if you have the manual or can download it from Allaire's web site.

Chapters 10 through 13, the heart of the book, cover developing a project plan and finally show us some code. The example code is deja vu all over again. Skip if you have any other book on Cold Fusion.

The second half of the book is a complete departure from Cold Fusion entirely (except for an Appendix on Cold Fusion Administrator - again, skip if you have the manual).

Amazingly, seven entire chapters are devoted to installing and testing SQL Server. What in blazes does this have to do with Cold Fusion? We're talking nearly 200 off-topic pages here ...

Skip the second half of this book if you have any book on SQL Server or (like me) are using Oracle and Apache web server.

This book might be okay for a first course in web database development. For serious developers who are truly interested in "Business Intelligence", I consider it a waste of money.

What experienced developers need is a book with a title like "Algorithms in Cold Fusion". How about it, O'Reilly?

I have the 2 Ben Forta books + Mastering CF and CF for Dummies. And this is the worst of the bunch. I would not recommend this for advance developers. This should have been entitled "Project Management for CF" not Business Intelligence. I don't need a lecture on project management (which this book focuses). To the publishers - I want techniques for Business Intelligence not Project Management! Thumbs Down!

I have some experience with ColdFusion development, and found the book to be a good introduction to an essential element of business intelligence--keeping the project on track. The first chapters of the book as well as the case study provided an easy-to-read introduction to the issue of project management (something I struggle with on all my development projects). Although the SQL coverage might seem superfluous, any seasoned developer will look to a robust database engine such as SQL Server to enable their applications: as it happens, I am fairly new to SQL so this coverage was a bonus for me. And, the CF examples--while somewhat basic--were nevertheless informative. A good start to a difficult topic--maybe there is a more robust, detailed second version in the works?