Programming ColdFusion MX Review - Second Edition, O'Reilly
by Rob Brooks-Bilson
ISBN: 0596003803
Programming ColdFusion MX by Rob Brooks-Bilson is the first book to cover Macromedia ColdFusion MX 6.1. Rob delayed publication of the book so he could cover the new features, and bug fixes in 6.1. Rob's decision to wait for the bugs to hit the windshield with CFMX 6.1 makes the readers task a bit easier.
Because this is the second edition of this book, one of the first things I did was to look for what changed in this version. Many of the initial chapters look to be pretty much the same. Rob did however add several chapters including User Defined Functions, ColdFusion Components, XML and WDDX (XML was added), Web Services, and Flash Remoting.
Coverage of UDF's is complete, which should be of no surprise (Rob is one of the creators of cflib.org). The Coverage of XPath is slim in the XML Chapter. Although you can buy entire books on XPath (Rob states that in depth coverage is out of scope), I think readers would benefit from a bit more coverage. I find in practice that it is easier to parse XML using XPath in ColdFusion, than looping through nodes. CFC's, and Web Services are covered in detail. Flash Remoting is covered in the level of detail that you would expect in a ColdFusion book. I found coverage of pretty much every topic I could think of, except CFX tags. While it does cover how to register a CFX tag, it does not cover creating them. Overall its a solid book with deep coverage.
