This book is great! It covers many aspects of Coldfusion Development which I had always wanted to know. Samples, Source Code and detailed explanations are excellent! A must have for any web developer interested in mastering their skill with Coldfusion.

I have gone through numerous ColdFusion books. I came across this book, Macromedia ColdFusion MX Web Application Construction Kit Fifth Edition, from a reference from a friend. So far into it, I have to say it is superb in the manner of which it is written, and is easily understandable. All terms, as well as common myths (such as the hits per page) are explained in detail broadening your knowledge in general of the Internet and its capabilities. Databasing and the basics are covered in the earlier chapters, followed by lead-ins to ColdFusion, and ColdFusion itself. If you're strongly interested in learning CF inside and out, you should also buy the bundle Amazon has with the Advanced Macromedia ColdFusion MX Application Development Third Edition.

So you want to code in Coldfusion hey? Start here. Having had no previous experience in Coldfusion, I picked up this book and was creating user login's, search interfaces, dual purpose insert and update pages in no time. This book covers it all, and a whole lot more.

Macromedia goes out of their way to anticipate "What the web can be", and Coldfusion delivers just that. This book by Ben Forta and Nate Weiss takes you step-by-step through a introduction to the Coldfusion environment, and then shows you how to unleash it's power. They instill excellent coding practices and the ultimate use of Coldfusion. Ben Forta makes it look easy, and it is. Together they have compiled an excellent manual/reference on the subject, and if you could have it delivered today, do so.

I looked up and down for the best cold fusion book for my specfic need...to build an enterprise quality content management system. I am a registered pharmacist and self taught HTML-based web developer who wanted to take a crack at cold fusion because of I heard it was the easiest to language to learn when developing dynamic web sites. Because I only knew HTML, I found myself using PHP code snippets from open source web sites to create some dynamic attributes to my pharmacy network's website (6 pharmacies). I originally wanted to have a simple "news publisher" so I could provide updates to the other staff. I grew frustrated because I didn't "really" know PHP and debugging was near impossible since I didn't know the code. Then along came this book, recommended by my sister who is a windows application programmer. She said Ben Forte writes the most comprehensive books/tutorials on cold fusion. She was exactly correct! Without getting into the details, I worked through this book from cover to cover and completed the tutorials on the included CD. 7 months later I have created a dynamic content management system for our pharmacy network that tracks transferred medications, provides news updates, online refills to customers, a daily revenue DB application for my director (which he can search by date range), an online store with customer history available, searchable policy/procedures online, etc. All this after only 7 months!! My advise for people is to learn HTML well before delving into Cold Fusion, but if you know HTML well, you will find this book to be your web design bible rather quickly. If I can do it anyone can...The hosptital I work for is even wanting to purchase the app from me now because it's such a valuable asset to the network's infrastructure. GO BUY THIS BOOK if you want to do something like I did with whatever business/site you want. With some dedication you can achieve it and not have to look further than this book.

I baugth this book and I had very little experience and knowledge of coldfusion. This book is great, it explains everything in a good order and it led me to develop online banking and complex extranet applications. You'll need others, but this one is the perfect starting point and a good guide for all levels.