This is my fourth CF book. That isn't to say that the first three were all rubbish, although one of them was! (ISBN 0735712719, which I quickly sent back; read my review at www.compman.co.uk and you'll see why)
I quickly moved on to ISBN 0321158024, which was a good, relatively cheap, get-you-started primer. However after a month or two I ran out of road with this as a CF reference work and I subsequently acquired ISBN 0072225564. Now there's nothing really wrong with this book, it's just that I still couldn't get the answers I wanted. After reading a load of reviews I acquired Rob's book the other day.
Now it may have over 1100 pages and look rather anorak-y but, trust me, it's brilliant and the writing style makes it easy to read. The author is clearly evangelical about CF, and if you haven't yet decided on a web development tool, after reading the first Chapter or so of this you'll ignore ASP, PHP and the rest.
I could give a dozen reasons why this is a book for beginners upwards, but just one example of how to do things quicker and simpler than the other books would be how to display a table of data with a header and alternately banded rows for greater legibility. Go to Chapter 11 and read example 11.2 on p314. If it looks like Greek to you, then it won't after you've read the early stuff or have played around with CF for longer than a week or three.
The bad news about this book is that I now want to re-code ALL my earlier stuff. The good news is that the lines of code are shrinking before my eyes, they're more decipherable, and probably faster.
OK, so I'll probably never use 30-50% of this book, but we're all different, and that 30-50% may well be the bits you need.
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