Mastering ColdFusion 4.5

Rating:
Summary: Mastering Coldfusion 4.5
Review: Excellent book for beginners. I have other ColdFusion books and I refer to this one the most.

Rating:
Summary: Get another book.
Review: I'd pick Ben Forta's "The ColdFusion web application construction kit" over this horribly written excuse for a cold fusion guide any day.

Beginners will find this book's layout tedious and confusing as it mixes beginning concepts with those far more advanced.

Even the tag and function references are poorly organized and give no examples on their proper usage.

The only use I can possibly fathom for this book is for advanced developers to give this book to beginning developers at their firm as a means to help insure their own job security.

Rating:
Summary: Touches on a lot, but not as much depth as I'd like
Review: This book hits a little bit here, a little bit there. However some sections (such as the CFFTP section) I found disappointing. It seems like some of this is just taken from the manual, with very little emphasis on the things that make each tag and function really useful. One exception being the advanced security section that told me a lot of what I was doing wrong with advanced security.

In short, this book is a mixed bag. If you already have the Ben Forta books, you probably won't benefit much from this book, if you're picking a first book for Cold Fusion, you might want to consider the Cold Fusion for Dummies book. Basically a good intermediate book somewhere between Forta's 2 books and CF for Dummies.

Oh, and another good plus over Forta/CF For Dummies, is that this book was written for CF 4.5 while Forta is written for CF 4.0.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent way to learn Cold Fusion
Review: This book is an excellent way to learn Cold Fusion. It covers nearly everything, from simple to complex. I especially enjoyed how concepts are applied : it starts with a simple solution and code to a program, then it points out improvements that could be made and how to do it. The code improvements are explained thoroughly and show potential problems with the previous methods. The scope of this book is enormous. It starts with the very basics, has an overview of standard programming topics as applied to Cold Fusion (such as IF/THEN, looping, comparisons, data types, etc), moves on to dynamic database interfacing, and culminates in advanced topics like variable locking and session management. It even includes a brief chapter on learning SQL for those who aren't already familiar with it. I found the reference parts of the book (Cold Fusion tags, functions, etc) and the included trial software on CD-ROM (Cold Fusion Server, CF Studio, and Apache web server) very beneficial, as it allows you to set up and run a local Cold Fusion application / web server on your PC without the need for an ISP yet.

My only criticism would be that there are a few errors in the code samples