Review: Three ColdFusion Books Compared

By: Chris Bowyer, Published: 2003-05-09, Parent Category: ColdFusion

Last on the list is O’Reilly’s “Programming ColdFusion,” which covers through to ColdFusion 5.0. I spent the least time of all with this book. If both of the above books sounded extreme in their handling of databases, this one will suit you just fine: it makes sure that you’re familiar with basic data types, conditionals, looping, includes, and forms (somewhat) before it dives into the subject of database connectivity and management. This book, as well, treats Lists and Arrays as if they were complex for some reason. Why is beyond me, but it doesn’t seem like such a major problem, what with the real fundamentals already out of the way. What bothered me most was the jumping back and forth from chapter to chapter in terms of relevance. Once you get past chapter 7, you find that the chapters switch back and forth between being about learning the language and being about more broad, subjective concepts. For example, a chapter about state management followed by one on security and then one on errors and exception handling. State management and exception handling are mostly taught with code examples, descriptions of new tags, and other such things. Security is more conceptual.

This tendency continues throughout the book. As the page count rises (there are just under 1000 in all, by the way), the usefulness of some of the chapters drop. How many of us will need to use the Verity Search Interface? Not too many…better to place more focus and emphasis on the Regular Expressions chapter, the chapter on the tag, or, above all, the one on custom tags, which is buried in the back in the form of chapter 19 (out of 24 total). In my opinion, chapters on more specialized and specific things should be bunched up in the back together. Things like custom tags and regular expressions, which are very practical and highly useful in building most applications, need to be given more focus; they need to be placed earlier in the book, before the more specialized chapters, which not as many of us are as likely to need or use.

I may be biased, but I have no choice but to select Wrox Press’ book, “Professional ColdFusion 5.0,” as the winner of this little competition of sorts. Coming in second is without a doubt O’Reilly’s offering, “Programming ColdFusion.” Lagging behind in third, with a few bright spots amidst a flurry of poorly ordered chapters, is Sams’ “Teach Yourself Allaire ColdFusion in 21 Days.” If you’re a developer looking to pickup the basic feel and syntax of another programming language quickly, I’d recommend O’Reilly’s book first, and Wrox’s in a close second. If you’re new to programming in general, I would recommend Wrox’s above all. If you don’t want to be bothered with CFML as a whole, but need a database-driven site written in CFML post haste, then I recommend Sams’ book. Happy coding!

« Sam's


This article was written by Chris Bowyer. Chris Bowyer is a web developer and radio producer and runs Movie Forums.