Book Review: Coldfusion 8 Developer Tutorial

Yesterday I received a copy of John Farrar's first published book ColdFusion 8 Developer Tutorial. I haven't made it too far into the book yet because I want to review the book for it's entire contents not just the parts that may interest me.

The book assumes no prior knowledge of Coldfusion but does assume a basic knowledge of other web programming technologies. This is an important point to note because a book with under 400 pages couldn't possibly teach a complete beginner what they need to know to create professional ColdFusion web applications.

I've only gone through the first few chapters and again I must say this is not a book for complete beginners, but I think would be suited to smooth the job of converting a PHP developer to CFML.

John doesn't waste anytime at all introducing the concept of CFC's and database interaction (Chapter 2) and for that I applaud him as he clearly indicate the old ways of doing things (processing and content in a single template) are just not how things are done anymore.

Chapter 3 goes into more depth with CFC's and working with forms, and Chapter 4 introduces you to Scopes (Application, Session and Request).

Thats about as far as I got into the book, and other than the obligitory typos and such that every editor and reviewer seem to miss, the book so far is fairly well written with good code examples.

I will complete my review when I have a chance to finish the book.

Happy Coding...