Customer Reviews

ColdFusion® MX Web Application Construction Kit (5th Edition)

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I am a Flash Designer with a moderate amount of ASP experience. I bought 3 CF books to begin my ColdFusion quest. This one *BY FAR* was the best written, easiest to understand, and most comprehensive!

With 1100 pages of learning and 400 pages of reference, this one is already tattered, highlighted, and dog-eared more than any book in my library.

I have to disagree with the other reviewer stating that some content should have been left to other books like basic SQL, etc... this information is invaluable if you are like me and are treading into new territory with CF.

With the code examples clearly displayed and explained, you don't need to sit in front of your computer while reading this book. You walk away understanding it without the need to load the accompanying files.

From someone who has read over 30 computer-based books in the last 18 months, I highly recommend this book to anyone that needs/wants a fast start into the world of ColdFusion MX.

This is the third edition of the "Web Construction Kit" I have purchased (I also have copies covering CF3.0 and CF4.5). The way Ben (and Nate) lay out real-world examples helps visualize the concepts. Many of the examples in the book not only show you how to use a particular tag, but also give additional notes to enhance performance.

I am particularly impressed with the attention they give to the application.cfm file. The previous versions of this book never seemed to fully explain the many uses for the file.

So far the chapters on session scope and security have been a great help, but I am also looking forward to delving into the charts chapter.

I have yet to fully read this book, but I am impressed with the fact that almost 300 pages is devoted to using "Client-side" Java within CFMX.

For anyone wanting to learn CFMX I suggest getting this book. I also own "Inside Coldfusion MX" and Que's "ColdFusion MX Development" and while I like both books, they lack the depth in which Ben goes into with his book.

I looked up and down for the best cold fusion book for my specfic need...to build an enterprise quality content management system. I am a registered pharmacist and self taught HTML-based web developer who wanted to take a crack at cold fusion because of I heard it was the easiest to language to learn when developing dynamic web sites. Because I only knew HTML, I found myself using PHP code snippets from open source web sites to create some dynamic attributes to my pharmacy network's website (6 pharmacies). I originally wanted to have a simple "news publisher" so I could provide updates to the other staff. I grew frustrated because I didn't "really" know PHP and debugging was near impossible since I didn't know the code. Then along came this book, recommended by my sister who is a windows application programmer. She said Ben Forte writes the most comprehensive books/tutorials on cold fusion. She was exactly correct! Without getting into the details, I worked through this book from cover to cover and completed the tutorials on the included CD. 7 months later I have created a dynamic content management system for our pharmacy network that tracks transferred medications, provides news updates, online refills to customers, a daily revenue DB application for my director (which he can search by date range), an online store with customer history available, searchable policy/procedures online, etc. All this after only 7 months!! My advise for people is to learn HTML well before delving into Cold Fusion, but if you know HTML well, you will find this book to be your web design bible rather quickly. If I can do it anyone can...The hosptital I work for is even wanting to purchase the app from me now because it's such a valuable asset to the network's infrastructure. GO BUY THIS BOOK if you want to do something like I did with whatever business/site you want. With some dedication you can achieve it and not have to look further than this book.

I have about 5 books on CFMX and this is the only one I use anymore. It seems to be a book that is either loved or hated with no room in between. I loved it and in the past I have not liked Forta's books.

I learn best by getting the big picture and seeing how the pieces fit rather than learning about the pieces and then building the big picture. This book allowed me to see the bigger picture and how the pieces fit in it.

Another reviewer complained about the explanation of the cflogin function. This was the very reason I loved the book. I looked at the code and glanced through the text for any needed explanations and the confusion I had was cleared up in a matter of minutes. An hour later the administrative site I was working on had much cleaner code and it was working properly.

Not every tag is covered in detail but most of what is covered in the body of the book was easy for me to understand. If you learn like me I highly reccomend it.

I had high hopes for this book, and it has let me down. This book is absolutely huge (~1500 pages), and it does not contain the level of detail that I was expecting.

Here's an example: I wanted to know what the valid returntypes of CFFUNCTION tags are (returntype is an attribute of the tag). Pretty reasonable, no? There is a chapter specifically designated to user-defined functions (i.e. the cffunction tag). That chapter tells me to refer to the appendix for information on the cffunction tag attributes. So, I look in the appendix, and the description of the RETURNTYPE attribute is: "Optional; name of data type that will be returned."

Well, DUH! I wanted to know what the valid return types are (e.g. integer, boolean, string, etc.), not the definition of what a return type is! This is the kind of basic information that I would expect to find in this book, as it is essential to programming in CF MX. However, it was astoundingly omitted, leaving me to scour the Internet for the information that I thought I had purchased with this book.

This is just one example, but it's a common theme throughout the book (CFLOGIN is another area where not nearly enough detail was presented, even though it's brand new in CF MX). The IsUserInRole function is a perfect example. What is this new concept of a "role"? How are roles set, so CF can know if a user is in a role that I'm checking against? I wanted some basic explanations of the intricacies of how this all works. However, none of this is covered, and I had to figure it out myself. They just give a simple definition and a vanilla example, and I have to figure out how the function works through my own trial-and-error, defeating the whole purpose of the book. The vast majority of topics that I tried to lookup in this book ended up with the same general outcome as I describe above.

I think that a big part of the problem is that this book has numerous authors, and it does not appear that they collaborated nearly enough. There is a great deal of redundant information, and the index is absolutely horrible. I would recommend to anyone who already knows the basics of web programming to instead use the documentation provided by Macromedia (developing apps in CF MX and CFML Language Reference). I've found those books to be many times more helpful than the Forta books.

Also disappointing is the Advanced book does not elaborate any further on these issues- it just covers different material which it deems to be "advanced".

Overall, I'm very disappointed with this book, but I'm not sure there is anything better (yet). Hopefully the book from O'Reilly will be better- I will certainly be checking it out. It's just not available yet as of the time I'm writing this review.

I am a self taught web designer and as such I demand books that teach me the how, why, in and out of cutting edge technologies.
I knew that I needed to build dynamic websites with speed, flexablity and ease in order to stay competitive in todays tech market. I did not know where to start until I found this book.
This book solidified what I knew and taught me what I did not know about the very basic things advanced users take for granted. There is no greater person to learn from than Ben Forta. He explains things very well and makes it fun to learn CFML coding. Yes, I will agree that this book is not for the advanced user, but that is why they have published an advanced book. I am writing this review for the average designer or html coder who wants to learn how to make their websites come to life with dynamic and rich content. Don't be scared to take a chance on learning a new technology. ColdFusion is light years ahead of ASP and PHP so you will be pleased at how much easier it is to use. In closing: THIS IS THE BOOK TO BUY! Thank you to Ben Forta to writing such a great book and thank to Allaire & Macromedia for making the best web products in the world!

I am relatively new to the world of ColdFusion. In my research before purchasing a ColdFusion book I was overwhelmed at how many people recommended this book to start with. While it's size may be a tad bit scary at first, you quickly find yourself immersed in an engaging and even entertaining read.

The book doesn't drive readers away with computer lingo that only the nerdiest of the nerds can understand, but rather uses common day to day phrases that even newcomers to the web development arena can understand. It has excellent real world examples given for almost all the instructions presented. It tells you how to do it, but also tells you why you should do it a certain way as opposed to another way.

I also appreciated that Ben didn't get technical for the sake of being technical. I have read many computer books where you feel the author is just trying to impress people with his knowledge. Ben presents the material in more of a flavor of someone that is truly interested in seeing you progress in knowledge and be successful in your endeavors to learn ColdFusion.

I also appreciated the coverage of SQL in the book. I had very little knowledge of SQL before I started reading it. I was surprised by a couple of the reviewers wishing the SQL had been left out. I feel this would have been a tremendous mistake. Having a basic fundamental knowledge of SQL is only going to help a CF developer write quality apps. The book does not get bogged down in SQL, it just presents the basics and gives examples of how to do the most common things in SQL. I feel it was a necessary couple of chapters that made things more clear later on down the line.

I also just recently purchased the Advanced version of this book and am looking forward to reading it. I highly recommend this book for ColdFusion beginners and for those that dabble in CF from time to time.

If your already proficient with CF, you probably will want to go with his advanced book.

No complaints from this reader whatsoever. For those that don't know, I'll add this... this book is the best selling ColdFusion book of all time. That says something about its quality.

I'm new to Cold Fusion...have only used ASP...and started creating a practice CF site using Macromedia's documentation which I found somewhat helpful but not entirely what I needed. Since this book wasn't immediately available, I purchased another CFMX book and was greatly disappointed...lots of theory and little practical application. Not so with Ben Forta's book. Within a half hour I was creating the Security Login page I was looking for and it worked perfectly the first time! This book is easy to read, understand and possibly the most useful book of its type I have ever used! I highly recommend it!

Last year I bought Macromedia Coldfusion 5 appliction Development for Ben Forta. I did like the book and I learned a lot from it. So with my order of Coldfusion MX software, I decided to order Coldfsuion MX Application Develpment for Ben Forta. I start reading and soon I am in the end of the book do you know why? because it is almust same as the first one. Even same example. There is chapters where is same on both edition word by word. Yes, there is few things new on coldfuion MX but not worth it.

My advice, if you have a book wrote by Ben Forta for Coldfusion 5 then don't buy the new one because you are buying same book but different cover. If it's your first time, then this book will be the one to start.

by the way, this is not only the mistake I did, I did buy Coldfusion MX Web Application Construction Kit, and Coldfusion MX Developer Study Guide. They are all same. in fact I did read same paragraph again, and again from different edition of Ben Forta.

I will say Ben Forta did it again and I did buy and waste my Money this time.

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.