Rating: 
Summary: Great techniques you can use today!
Review: Are you tired of all the Flash talk and ready to dive into improving your ColdFusion skills? This is the book for you then! The authors waste no time diving into techniques for improving you skills. In the first couple of pages on string manipulation, I learned tips I could use today. They move quickly into arrays and structures (a challenge for most beginners!) If you're building an application for the first time, the techniques and advice offered throughout will give you working code to build and expand upon. One section is devoted to database interaction including a simple SQL database you can build to run examples and separate coverage of stored procedures in both MS SQL Server and Oracle. Each recipe is described in a short sentence, making it easy to determine whether it's the one you're looking for, followed by the technique with one or more examples and further comments. There's no wasted text. Especially interesting to me are the chapters detailing use of the new XML tags and functions and interoperability with JSPs and Servelets. An excellent list of resource websites is included as an appendix. This book is a great companion to your CFML Reference guide. The only improvement would be to make it a fatter, more detailed book! The cookbook is one of Sams Developer's Library editions, specializing in providing practicing programmers with a core reference to assist them in common day-to-day programming tasks. Highly recommended for intermediate developers wanting to improve their skills quickly. Lisa Wilson
Sacramento ColdFusion User Group Manager
Rating: 
Summary: Easy to understand
Review: As a person with English as a second language, some content in the users guides that comes with the software can be tricky to understand. This book saves my hair! Even though the content is easy to understand, I was hoping to cover the more CFMX specific new features, especially Flash Remoting. There was no mention of that feature in the book. Overall, advanced developer probably won't get much new out of this book, but beginner and intermediate programmer will have this as a great and easy to understand resource.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent Resource
Review: I find this book to be a very useful resource -- it has an extensive index and table of contents that are helpful when I'm looking for a specific topic. While the book is not organized in a sequential, "learn from the start" order, I find that its recipe format, with descriptive section headers, often prompts me to explore new topics and learn more about aspects of the technology that I haven't used in the past. Each recipe includes a Technique section with code examples, and then a Comments section that discusses the code in easy-to-understand English. I would recommend this book to anyone doing anything that involves ColdFusion.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Resource
Review: I find this book to be a very useful resource -- it has an extensive index and table of contents that are helpful when I'm looking for a specific topic. While the book is not organized in a sequential, "learn from the start" order, I find that its recipe format, with descriptive section headers, often prompts me to explore new topics and learn more about aspects of the technology that I haven't used in the past. Each recipe includes a Technique section with code examples, and then a Comments section that discusses the code in easy-to-understand English. I would recommend this book to anyone doing anything that involves ColdFusion.
Rating:
Summary: Full of jewels
Review: I found enough in the first chapter to make this book worth the price. I've read the online docs and like them, but find this book very helpful in getting directly to a task and getting to the nuts and bolts. This book is probably not geared toward the beginner, but would make a great side-by-side reference for the online documentation and or an introductory book. I would have been disappointed if this book made me wade through chapters of language basics already covered in the documentation and applications that I'll never want to write. Instead, I found ample coverage on all common tasks and emphasis on important tasks. There was full coverage on Java CFX, for instance, but empahsis on the new and better ways of communicating with Java in CFMX. Another reviewer questioned the coverage of Arrays, SQL and XML. I already have references for these topics on my bookshelf gathering dust. What I wanted from this book, was quick coverage of the basic tasks concerning XML, for instance, that I would use in any language, but specific to ColdFusion. I got that in 5 minutes. Assign a document to an object, parse the document, etc. I found I was wanting to play with many of the examples, which is not generally the case with books that have example applications that span entire chapters(examples in this book are concise and to the point). And since building applications is simply a process of building small tasks, testing them and assembling them, I liked the approach. I tried the other way and ended up spending more time on troubleshooting than I did writing the application in the first place. The process of writing the test first really helps in productivity and reduces frustration. This book helps in this area and is why I would also recommend it for beginners. This book will stay on my desk!
Rating:
Summary: Easy to Understand and Very Good
Review: It's not very often that I find myself reading a cookbook from beginning to end, but I did on this one. Despite having three authors, it's very well organized and easy to read, with a simple and consistent presentation for each of the recipes or topics. It makes a good reference companion book for ColdFusion developers, whether mere beginners or more experienced experts. Only some 300 pages long, it is definitely concise but thorough, in contrast to some other weightier, but not necessarily better, books on ColdFusion. I wish it had appeared years ago for previous versions of ColdFusion.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to Understand and Very Good
Review: It's not very often that I find myself reading a cookbook from beginning to end, but I did on this one. Despite having three authors, it's very well organized and easy to read, with a simple and consistent presentation for each of the recipes or topics. It makes a good reference companion book for ColdFusion developers, whether mere beginners or more experienced experts. Only some 300 pages long, it is definitely concise but thorough, in contrast to some other weightier, but not necessarily better, books on ColdFusion. I wish it had appeared years ago for previous versions of ColdFusion.
Rating: 
Summary: A cookbook that gives you a certain taste
Review: The layout and structure (font used, concise style, organization) of this book is very good. Many topics are covered. Yet this is an elementary book that simply copies most of what is in the user's guide. The examples are also so simple as the ones in the user's guide. A developer using this book will not have a lot to cook with. Examples: - Does it show, for example, how and why to use temporary tables in stored procedures? Not. It only shows the basics (how to call a stored procedure from within ColdFusion, how to write a simple one, etc. - the same stuff you find in the user's guide). - CFX Tags? Only basic CFX C++ (which is getting outdated since CFX Java is available). By the way, CFX Java is only covered in one page - a lot less than in the user's guide for this one!) - Arrays, structures, lists? Only the basics again. The user's guide has even more for some. - SQL? How to insert, delete, group, update, join. Any dummy CF book will have more. And the user's guide too. - XML coverage? Better not to compare it with the user's guide. The fact that some reviewers liked this book is either because they never bothered to read the user's guide or, even worse, they have not yet noticed that there is an online user's guide (with all the simple examples that this book has and still a lot more) in ColdFusion Studio! So one star for the nice layout and for copying the user's guide in a way that convinced a distracted editor and some lazy or unexperienced readers.
Rating:
Summary: A valuable resource for anybody already familiar with CFML
Review: There are plenty of ColdFusion books available, unfortunately many of them just follow the same structure, trying to cover ColdFusion from start to finish (often ending up as around 1000 pages). While those books can be just fine for the beginners, they offer very little value to the experienced developer. This is the first ColdFusion cookbook to ever hit the market, and it's a pretty good one, providing practical solutions to common problems. I am giving it 4 stars out of five only because I would expect more in depth coverage of certain topics, for example, the chart section lacks details and RegExp are barely covered (hidden inside the string handling chapter). Although 50-100 additional pages with more advanced recipes are missing from this book, it's still a valuable resource for anybody already familiar with CFML
Rating:
Summary: Concise and task-oriented
Review: This book's strength is that it is extremely task-oriented. Readers will find clear information about how to do a variety of specific tasks in Cold Fusion, such as searching a verity collection or creating a java CFX tag. Readers looking for information about how to build full-fledged applications may not be entirely satisfied with this book, as it isn't set up as a tutorial. The book would be a perfect companion to a more exhaustive tome -- it's a nice "quick reference" guide when you need a refresher on how to do a discrete task.
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