Customer Rating:  
Summary: This is NOT the MX 'bible'
Comment: I don't understand why this book has so many positive reviews. I have been a full-time coldfusion developer for 6 years. Our team of 4 coldfusion developers have the Ben Forta for CF 4.5 and this book.
We find this book fairly useless as a coldfusion reference. Sure it covers the procedures of web development in coldfusion, SQL, and related technologies, but you can't rely on it as a coldfusion reference once you've mastered the basics. Functions and Tags seem to either be poorly indexed, poorly detailed, or just plain missing from the book altogether. This would not be such a crime if the book had not been titled the 'bible'
We kept having to go back to our Ben Forta CF 4.5 book to look things up, even though we are running CF 6.1. We are going to have to go out and get another MX book for the newer coldfusion functions and features; this one doesn't cut it.
Save yourself time and money by getting a good reference on CF MX, and if you need help with SQL and other technologies buy a good SQL reference, etc.
Customer Rating:
Summary: First CFMX reference I reach for...
Comment: ...and usually the last. I've purchased a number of ColdFusion books in the past few years, and always loved the Mastering series for CF 4.5 and 5. When MX came out, I bought both Mastering and the Bible, but truthfully, I barely ever open the Mastering book. Everything I've ever needed to learn has been in the CFMX Bible.
Adam Churvis and crew really know their stuff. Clear, concise discussions on important topics, intelligible diagrams and an index that actually helps you find topics you're looking for quickly! How long has it been since a good technical manual had one of those?!?!
For me, CFCs were something that I was going to get around to eventually, but never seemed to get the time to mess with them, but when I finally did, the Bible taught me everything I needed to know to start building them. The discussion on Web Services finally explained to me what all the hype about them is, and I actually had fun building the sample web service application and learning about XSLT.
I recommend the ColdFusion MX Bible highly, and suggest you keep an eye out for anything else Adam and David Churvis author.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A No-Nonsense Approach to Mastering the Product:
Comment: Of all the things I COULD say in praise of this book, the single most important feature is that you can actually LEARN from it. The book presents a consistent style and presentation, and is thus an excellent learning tool. There is no "wasted space", discussing irrelevant subjects; no "beating around the bush" getting to the true meat. Here, you know the authors care about the material, and imparting it to YOU, in the most straight-forward way possible. It also is immediately apparent that the authors live in the "trenches" of daily professional experience with all of the product lines.....CF coding, databases, performance issues, product nuances, and the like. There is no substitute for this level of insight; here, you are gaining REAL-WORLD perspective that is SO hard to obtain otherwise. I will stop here, but you get the point....Mr. Churvis, et al, have produced a publication that honors the learning experience. If you want/need to move your web development knowledge UP several notches, this book is one of the best investments you can make.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Bottom Line
Comment: I have 2 books about ColdFusion. This one and Dreamweaver MX 2004 with ASP, ColdFusion and PHP: Training from the Source.This book: Great if you want to learn how to hand-code applications using ColdFusion MX. Very in-depth covering all aspects of ColdFusion. This book does not deal with dialog based apps like Dreamweaver. You can hand-code with DW, however. The other book (DW MX 2004 w/ASP, CF and PHP: TFTS): Wonderful if you want to learn how to create applications with DreamWeaver specifically as it goes through all the dialog based application development. Both books are excellent. I have both because I want to know the code behind my apps but I don't necessarily want to have to always type code.
Customer Rating:
Summary: This book is the truth
Comment: Yeah, I know all of the reviews of this book thus far are great, but there is a reason why...this book touches upon almost any type of information you need to use MX. I found the sections using CFCs especially helpful. The authors not only tell you how to create CFCs, but provide a very useful scenario (using CFCs to hide business logic). The book also gives some good examples of how to integrate Java, COM, XML, etc. into MX. The number of real world type coding examples as well as the step-by-step how to approach is what differentiates this book from a lot of the MX documentation re-make books I have seen (see Mastering ColdFusion MX). This book has a lot great information on everything from thre basics to creating Web Services. Overall, this book lives up to the hype, and is probably the best MX book I've seen.
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