Customer Reviews

Essential ColdFusion 4.5 for Web Professionals

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is an excellent reference. The authors are very knowledgeable & professional. Basic HTML and Database experience would be helpful in understanding this book.

Although it is entitled ColdFusion 4.5, the foundation with CF Version 5 is still the same.

Highly recommended, if you are result-oriented without going through too much jargon & browsing very thick manuals.

Overall, what I would say about this book is that it's a lot like the other "essential ____ for web professionals," in that it will give you a quick-and-dirty introduction to ColdFusion, but if you are in need of a serious piece of reference material, I'd stick with Forta's "Web Application Construction Kit," or Danesh & Motlagh's "Mastering ColdFusion 4.5." If you need to learn CF in a weekend, and you have a solid background in another web development language, like ASP or JSP, then this book will probably be ok. There are a couple of inaccuracies and misstatements in this book. For example, the authors tell you that if you have a search string in your SQL statement that contains the single quote character, you should use the PreserveSingleQuotes function. This function doesn't work; instead, you should use CFQUERYPARAM. The other complaint I have about this book is that it encourages the use of what I like to call the "bumper car" tags, like CFINSERT and CFTABLE. Encouraging the use of these tags helps perpetuate the belief in the web development community that ColdFusion is to web development what bumper cars are to the automobile. People should hand-code their tables and SQL statements. All that having been said, I would say the "web professionals" series has some fine offerings, including their books on Photoshop and DHTML - if you're like me and you need a quick, intro course without getting too much into the technical minutiae, this is a good series. But, in this case, you probably want to have a more comprehensive reference at your side to get the syntax right.

I found this to be far superior to other entry-level ColdFusion books I've viewed to date.

You must have a knowledge of HTML basics first, in order to understand the examples. But what examples they are!

If you need to be on the fast track for CF, make this a part of your library.

I picked up this book for a class project in ColdFusion. It served as a really good introduction - I read through it in a couple of hours. Good book for readability, I wouldn't recommend it if you need a reference book.

Doesn't have all the features of the latest ColdFusion MX release but has all the essentials for a simple CF project.

This book serves more as a reference for Coldfusion instead of a true tutorial. This book however is extremely useful as it provides real world examples and snips of code that can be used in projects. It is possible to learn Coldfusion through this book, but I recommend another book to really learn the ins and outs of Coldfusion.

A must have for your resource library.

Great for the first time Cold Fusion User and an excellent tool for the advanced users to have in their resource library.

A must have for your resource library. Great for the first time Cold Fusion User and an excellent tool for the advanced users to have in their resource library.

This book is really a handbook, It's open on my desk while I work! Good explanations!

A must have for your resource library.

Great for the first time Cold Fusion User and an excellent tool for the advanced users to have in their resource library.