For those of you who already own Ben's "Macromedia ColdFusion MX 7 Web Application Construction Kit" (WACK), this is a must-have companion for die-hard CF7 developers.

Instead of touching on topics like WACK, this book dives in depth into some pretty hefty issues such as advanced CFCs, CF7s new gateway feature, using XML & XSLT with CF, performance tweaking your CF server and more.

DO NOT buy this book as a sole resource for CF7. This book is intended for advanced ColdFusion use as the title states. If you're new to CF, buy WACK... it's an extremely thorough step by step guide and will also turn into an excellent reference tool. If you're just looking for a CF desk reference/companion, get O'Reilly's "Programming ColdFusion MX" (which doesn't really teach you too well, but is much better than WACK for just flipping to a page and finding what you want). Bear in mind that as of 05/17/2005 O'Reilly doesn't "have any plans currently for a new edition of that book" (quote from an e-mail I received from O'Reilly)... so get WACK7 if you really must have something on CF7's new features.

The only thing preventing me from giving the book 5 stars is the fact that much of the content in this book is identical to what was available in the previous edition. However, the new CF7 content is invaluable and the book does contain an abundant wealth of new and useful information.

If you're an advanced ColdFusion user (use CFCs, Custom Tags, UDFs, use clustering, want to further secure your CF app., integrate your app with C++/Java/.NET (no C#),etc. in your applications), you need this book.