internet applications

I bought this book last week. I was kind of expecting another "demo jockey" visual quickstart book. Instead of showing you what each menu item does...this book takes you through a more tutorial based learning experience. I have found this book to be extremely helpful. I am not a programmer, and frankly have little desire to be one. This book shows you Dreamweavers object oriented approach to creating coldfusion apps through Dreamweavers codegen functionality. I have been corresponding with the author (Sue Hove) and she has informed me that there are really no changes from DreamweaverMX and Dreamweaver MX 2004's codegen functionality. So this is the book to get even if you are running MX 2004 and coldfusion mx 6.1.

I'm new to ColdFusion and am a hard person to teach. I don't do well after just reading a book. I needed a more tutorial or hands-on based book to walk me through and allow me to actually do it. I'm on chapter 6 so far and with the exception of some serious problems with the steps on page 51 (Ben Forta has an errata on his website for this page) its been great. I can usually tell if I am going to get anything out of a book or not after the first few pages or a chapter. Which is why I bought this book about a week after buying ColdFusion MX with Dreamweaver MX by David Green. Not sure why people say in some reviews that there is "too much talk" in these books, I need all the information I can get and this book seems to provide it in a way that even I can understand..and let me tell you thats saying a lot. Hope you have as good of an experience as I have.

This book is a good primer for static HTML designers wishing to make the leap to ColdFusion MX. This is especially true if you're a new or experienced user of Dreamweaver MX.

While you won't finish the book and become fully versed in CF development, tags and administration, you will be able to work well with CF developers and their CF templates. This will make it easy to plug the design over a the back-end scripting or vice-versa.

The next step in becoming comfortable CF developer would be the "Developing ColdFusion Applications" books by Ben Forta. If you know HTML, start with this book, then move on to the Forta books for an in-depth look at CF and developing applications.

Whichever route you choose, don't be discouraged if you struggle with some concepts. Try experimenting and keep developing over time... the only way become proficient in CF. There are a ton of resources, newsgroups and mailing lists for when you get stuck.