Last year I bought Macromedia Coldfusion 5 appliction Development for Ben Forta. I did like the book and I learned a lot from it. So with my order of Coldfusion MX software, I decided to order Coldfsuion MX Application Develpment for Ben Forta. I start reading and soon I am in the end of the book do you know why? because it is almust same as the first one. Even same example. There is chapters where is same on both edition word by word. Yes, there is few things new on coldfuion MX but not worth it.

My advice, if you have a book wrote by Ben Forta for Coldfusion 5 then don't buy the new one because you are buying same book but different cover. If it's your first time, then this book will be the one to start.

by the way, this is not only the mistake I did, I did buy Coldfusion MX Web Application Construction Kit, and Coldfusion MX Developer Study Guide. They are all same. in fact I did read same paragraph again, and again from different edition of Ben Forta.

I will say Ben Forta did it again and I did buy and waste my Money this time.

Ben does it again! I was very pleased with the book. The coverage of CFMX's advanced features was excellent! The book is designed to allow you to skip around, not requiring you to read it cover to cover.

The book also provides many ideas for integrating COM,CORBA,C++ and most importantly JAVA into your CFMX applications. There is also a section on integrating with popular applications (like MS Word, Excel, Outlook, Fax Service, and ADO).

The best part of the book was the information on Advanced Custom Tags and Java integration!

Great book for those who are interested in learning advanced techniques.

Caution: Not a very good book for newbies to CF or CFMX.

This book covers many advanced topics like scalability, WDDX , CFC, Regular Expressions, custom tags, COM and internationalisation. If you are serious about ColdFusion development, it's an essential reference.
The targets are those who eat, sleep, and breathe ColdFusion. It covers topics you didn't even know existed with ColdFusion. Just when you think you are an "advanced" developer, along you will discover new things...
The authors managed to assemble tons of invaluable information, designed to be read and used as needed (instead of in a linear fashion), one chapter at time. This makes it ideal for picking up and reading on specific subjects as the need arises

I've been using ColdFusion for many years now. I was exciting with the release of MX and decided to pick up a few books to round out my knowledge of functionality of the language. So I picked up Forta's latest-and-greatest.

It wasn't long after getting the guide that something seemed amiss. I covered most of the gorilla-sized book in two evenings. It was actually pretty easy! Several of the chapters are complete wastes. A huge section rehashes WDDX -- does anyone need this much info on the topic? Javascript gets an entire section -- I'll buy a book if I need a refresher. I was fuming at the pages of unwieldy code on some custom tag for rendering calendars. If code exceeds 15 lines, put it on a CD. The last time I typed in volumes of code from a book, I was using a TRS-80 Model III. The book covers too many esoteric topics in too much detail.

What is new with MX? CFCs. Webservices. XML. Guess what chapters were lacking serious bulk? You guessed it. You'll get a taste -- and then zip -- off to another esoteric chapter about building additional rooms on your house with WDDX. I would have been thrilled if half the book covered using CFCs in detail, but I had to place another order for another book that covers the topic in advanced detail.

I should learned when I bought the first two Forta ColdFusion books years ago. They didn't feel right. Now that I'm an advanced user -- I know why. This'll be the last ColdFusion reference I'll buy from him and his team. I'll just bore myself with the docs in the future.

I'm glad they left out the huge reference of previous guides -- otherwise, I would garner the book with one star.

Most ColdFusion books don't go beyond the basics, so they don't encourage CFers to think like "real" programmers. This one does.

If you're building simple sites that don't have to support a lot of users, you probably don't need this book (except for cfhttp, which really should have been in the first volume of this set). Most of the information in the book isn't all that useful for everday CF tasks, but when you do need to go beyond the basics, you'll need to understand this stuff.

As the title points out, this is for "advanced" development. If you want to harness the full power of ColdFusion and do things the "right" way, buy this book.