Forta's Forte: Writing Cold Fusion References...
Written: Mar 01 '01 (Updated Mar 01 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: easy to read, excellent in-depth explanations on advanced concepts
Cons: not enough code snippets
The Bottom Line: Forta is still the Cold Fusion God - he writes in an extremely understandable manner and he knows his CF. This book is a must-have for the veteran CF developer.
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| wahoodude23's Full Review: Advanced Coldfusion 4 Application Devel |
Overview
I had the pleasure of meeting Ben Forta at one of my previous jobs. He is a very well spoken, quiet and intelligent person and darn good Cold Fusion author. Advanced Cold Fusion 4 Application Development is the second and more thorough version of Forta’s Cold Fusion collection. Differentiated by a fluorescent green color instead of the navy blue (for the basic version), this book covers many of the advanced concepts in Cold Fusion(CF) programming in wonderful detail. Ben Forta has established himself as the definitive word in CF application programming and he certainly has not disappointed his readers with his latest reference. This is not to say this book is perfect, far from it is, but it is still far and away the best of what has been offered to date for Cold Fusion developers.
Who this book is for…
As the title implies, this book is the advanced version of the 1st reference, which is more of an introduction to CF concepts. This book is for the veteran CF programmer (at least 1 year programming experience) who already understands and grasps the language and is looking for ways to improve, enhance, and modularize their code as well as delve into more advanced coding and database concepts. Novices should go ahead and pick up Ben Forta’s first book – a quick read through that one is a great start.
How this book is used…
To pick it up, open to page 1, and read until you finish is probably not the best way to utilize this book. While there are sections that are very well written and detailed, this book also serves extremely useful as a reference manual. When the programmer is stumped or confused about how to populate a structure or array, they can simply flip to that section of the manual and begin reading. There are most definitely sections of this book that can and should be read just for knowledge purposes also. So there are a variety of ways to use this book. Ultimately, the programmer himself decides – but I see this book as a decent read and a great reference manual.
What is in this book…
It will be impossible to cover everything that Ben Forta covers in this epinion. That’s why he was paid a lot more to write than I ever will be. After all, I’m a programmer – what do I know about righting… oops I mean writing? OK – bad bad joke.
As I was saying, Forta covers a lot of stuff in this book. In addition to the CF documentation on all of the functions and tags, there are excellent in-depth reads on scalability issues, managing client and session state, the WDDX tag, implementing security, custom tags, regular expressions, and much more. As I am sure, Forta is a CF developer himself, I find that he truly has a solid understanding of all of the concepts but more importantly he has the ability to effectively communicate that to the reader. A lot of the programming issues that Forta deals with in this advanced manual are issues that arise in CF enterprise environments. When Forta discusses scalability and how to load balance CF server clusters, these are incidents that happen in real production environments. This is what makes his information so valuable – the fact that it can be applied, in concept, to these real environments.
What’s missing in this book…
While Forta does an excellent job in detailing many of the advanced CF concepts, he lacks ample code examples. I found many of the snippets to be very simple and not easy to apply in a more robust environment. Forta needs to back up his explanations and descriptions with more example code so that the developer can get better ideas on how to apply the concepts.
I am looking forward to hopefully seeing these improvements in Forta's next reference for CF 4.5.
What I like most about this book…
Unlike a lot of other technical references out there, Forta has the unique ability to transfer his knowledge to his pen is a way that is concise and easily comprehensible. Advanced Cold Fusion 4 Application Development is a great, easy read filled with an abundance of information that is organized in a very logical order.
Recommended:
Yes
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wahoodude23
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Location: Ashburn, VA
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