 |
This is one of those great books - a real gem - and that's why I've chosen it as my first review book. So maybe its a bit off topic you might think - and going by the history of my blog so far you would be quite right. But I'm expanding the coverage of my blog to cover Adobe ColdFusion because its the best platform for delivering software products on the web with an agile approach - ColdFusion is made for the agile programmer - and this book is a must have. I started programming when I was 11 years old on the ZX81 in basic with some exploration into machine code. It wasn't until 15 years later that I started working on web applications and I was introduced to ColdFusion. This is a software development platform that includes its own server, compiler and mark-up language. In the bad old days of ColdFusion 3.1 we were coding in notepad and the mark-up was interpreted on the fly per request. These days with ColdFusion 8 the code is compiled into Java and ColdFusion is effectively a facilitator layer over Java. |
That's why this book is so important for the advanced ColdFusion developer - now ColdFusion allows the programmer to harness all the power of Java without needing to write any Java code. So this book isn't important because it teaches ColdFusion programmers how to program in Java - its important because it illustrates how Java works so that the ColdFusion programmer can better understand how to harness its power and still not need to write any Java code.
This became important when ColdFusion introduced the cfc or cold fusion component in version 6. This allowed ColdFusion applications to be written with some architectural benefits of object orientation and since then subsequent versions have built upon this exposing more and more of the benefits of oo.
On the other hand if you really do want to learn Java and you are currently restricted to what you know about ColdFusion then this will do the job for you.
This also happens to be a very rare book and I believe its now out of publication - hence the high price tag. The version I have has $49.99 printed on the back which is about £30 these days and when I bought it second hand it was £42.50 - now you'll be lucky to get it for less than £70. The sign of a very, very good book I'd say.