OMAR said
I really like Coldfusion and want to stick with it but Adobe is letting me down.
WHERE ARE THE RESOURCES? WHERE ARE THE BOOKS?
It's such a joke!
For a piece of software that costs $1300 giving us one book written by Ben Forta is clearly not enough.
I love it when people say "Oh Coldfusion is so easy you don't need resources" HAHA.
Nobody supports it.There's never sample code available for anything such as PayPal, Amazon Web services etc.
What is Adobe doing?
It's your product. Do something already. It's been like thins for years. Ive waited it out hoping they'd get their act together and begin doing some marketing.
Look how much is available about PHP,.NET, even Ruby for Rails has more resources and came out YEARS after CF.
You might as well kill the product if the web is not embracing it and you obviously are doing nothing to support the web developer community.
Andor Admiraal said
Having used the previous edition of this series (7MX), this edition turned out to be a bit of a disappointment. It looks like the publisher compromised on quality rather than on release date. Points to note before you buy this:
- Some of the chapters are to be downloaded as PDF's. These chapters are not just some appendixes or add-ons covering bonus topics. These are integral parts of the book. In fact, it would be hard to guess why one chapter made it to the book while another did not. Why, for example, put information on the basics and good practices of web development in the book, but leave information on using ColdFusion to consume web services to the downloadable PDF's?
It would make more sense to make the books a little thicker, or to create a volume 4. If cost consideration are at the heart of this decission, then why print a book in the first place? Unable to decide on making a book or a site, the publisher mixed the two up in an unfortunate way. Puzzeling stuff.
- The books generally feels sluggish. Certain parts are not as well written as others. Moreover, some writing is clearly targetted at the very beginner in web development, whereas other chapters (for example, on the integration of CF with .Net) are understandble only by those who are already quite advanced in both CF and .Net.
- In almost all new chapters there are some minor gramatical and technical/logical errors that should have been taken out by the editor. Most people might not notice most of these, but for a 50 dollar book I believe proper editing is not too much to ask.
- Much, perhaps most, of the content is simply copied from the previous series of this book. But alas, why fix it if it ain't broken? But on the other hand, not all of the new CF8 features are fully covered. For example, the coverage of the new cfimage tag, the new Ajax functionality, the newly integrated rich text editor and integration with Flex leave much ground untouched. Even though the series consists of 3 books, it can not be considered a full reference on ColdFusion.
- Unlike the previous version of the books, there is no reference section of CF functions and tags. For this and the above reasons, I still regularly refer to my good old WACK 7MX books, rather than this new and updated edition.
- Most importantly: there is no index for all three books combined. So if you want to look up something, you need to go through three indexes to know which information is available.
Say, you want to know how to localize the way dates and times are rendered for a non-US audience. Displaying a date is rather basic, so you first look in the index of volume 1. It's not there, so you look in volume 2 and finally, by going through the index of volume 3, you find that you find the information you look for is in chapter 50. This is one of the PDF's you then download, print or read from the screen. Not very handy.
It is generally much faster to use Google or the Adobe site to find an answer to a specific question as it is. But if the publisher makes such a mess of the books, the match is off.
Conclusion: if you want books on the new features of ColdFusion 8, then this series is the one to buy, simply because there is nothing else out there. If you want to learn ColdFusion from scratch, this is a rather OK tutorial. Not great, just OK.
But if you want a good reference on ColdFusion, the previous edition of the same series (CF7MX) is much better. This is mainly due to its reference list of ColdFusion tags and functions by topic, which was thrown out in this edition. Also: you have only two, not three indexes to go through in order to find the information you look for.
For our offshore web development office, I was contemplating to buy an extra series of these books as a reference for our CF-people there. I decided that they would be much better off with just a printout of the documentation provided on the site of Adobe. That is more consise, complete, and free. A sad conclusion for a series I had rather high expectations of.
Arleston Lueders said
It's a good book. You'll see components, session, security, JSON, cookies, performance, manipulate images, well.. getting more deep into the application. You will also see some Ajax and Flex integration.
I wish this book could have more about ColdFusion AJAX and Flex working together, but I guess it should have another book just focused on those technologies (CF+Ajax+Flex). ColdFusion 8's new Ajax/Flex features are great. For intermediate programmers, it's worth.
K. Miller said
I love Ray Camden's work, and this book is no exception. He has a straightforward writing style with lots of examples to back it up. CF8 has a lot of new features, and if you work with CF8, this is the reference set to start with. If you have prior works, you'll continue to love it, though you'll rapidly get sick of the old 'Orange Whip Studios' sample.
Now the bad part. For some reason the publisher split this into 3 separate books. If I pile them all up they are about the same size as the last single CF book I bought by Ray, except that you now pay over twice as much. Myself, I'd rather have the single big book.
Second grief; about 1/3 of the content is on CD... except it isn't on CD's... You have to download the PDFs from Ray's site. Personally, I hate electronic copy for reference books, I like to flip between pages and dog ear topics of interest. The publisher did the same thing in the prior versions of this book, though at least they had the dignity to include the CD with the book.
Editors PLEASE: offer a set of completely printed volumes and a set of electronic volumes. Let the users choose. If Ray went with a different publisher that did this I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
So, content aside - which is excellent - this entire line reeks of a bunch of new VPs brainstorming how to improve quarterly margins. You can almost visualize the Dilbert like conversation...
VP1: 'OK, first we'll only publish 2/3s of the content, we'll put the last chapters on CD, that'll save us a bunch!.
VP2: 'heh, why attach the CD, we could save $0.03 on each sale if we DIDN'T attach it! Let 'em download it!
VP3: 'In fact, we'll make 'ol Ray put it on his site so we don't even have to pay for hosting space - that way we can shaft the customers AND the author (laugh around the table). They'll be paying us for something we don't even provide!
VP1: 'GREAT!, and, wait - yeah - we could cut it into 2 books and charge twice as much!'
VP2: 'Come on man, be bold - THREE volumes and charge THREE times as much!'
VP3: 'Oh man, no wonder they fired thoses bozo VPs before us - we'll double earnings in one quarter alone! I can't wait for the bonuses!'
Anyway, great job to Ray. Publishers - WAKE UP!
M. Murphy said
I have almost every book that Ben Forta has written on ColdFusion and have been a big fan of his teaching and writing style but this book is a big disappointment to me.
Firstly, I did not purchase volume 1 since I already have a basic working knowledge CF thanks to his previous books and at the current prices didn't think I needed a reprise. Vol 2 appeared to cover the new CF8 features but it appparently is not a stand-alone version since there were no instructions as to where to obtain and install the sample code and tutorials used in the book. I finally found the link on the back cover, visited the Forta/book site and accessed the forum. I found the supporting files to Vol 2, downloaded and installed them, then discovered that I apparently needed databases and files included in previous books. Not only that, but to "reduce the price" of the book, half the chapters are online.
Chapt 29 spent a great deal of Page space (which seems to be at a premium) expounding on the need to create a good user experience (navigation techniques, fast downloads, etc) - this book was supposed to be on CF8, not best practices in website design. I would have preferred he used the valuable page space for CF8 features and techniques.
I still haven't located what appear to be missing files in a missing directory called "imageserver", (which displays a "page not found" message when trying to view the example code files in Chapter 33) even after spending some frustrating time surfing the online forum.
I expected a book devoted to the new and upgraded CF8 features and not revisiting previous code examples (like Next N) unless the new features impact the former way of doing things, which are covered in a previous Forta books like: Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit and Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX Application Development (3rd Edition).
I paid almost $50 for one volume of a 3 volume book which is mostly a rewrite of the previous content and half of that is only available on line. I would rather have paid a bit more for new valuable content on the changes in CF8.
When I purchase a book, I expect a book that I can read sitting in a chair - not sitting at a computer reading a pdf file or printing it out on a ream of paper!
Forta's other books are great but this book is not worth the price.
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