Five years ago I was called upon to learn Cold Fusion over a weekend before starting a new assignment. I picked up Ben Forta's original Cold Fusion book and read three or four chapters on the way home on the train, picking up the bulk of what I needed to know to do my work in a few short hours. I've done a lot of work with Cold Fusion since then, and used that book to pick up many of the finer points of the craft, including the CFPOP and CFMAIL tags which I used to build a web-based e-mail service.The web has changed a lot since 1998, and so has Cold Fusion. That book served me well, but with all the technological advances since its publication, I needed a new book that offered coverage of all the new features in Cold Fusion, from support for Flash and XML to invocation of web services and next-generation Cold Fusion components.
Cold Fusion MX Developer's Handbook fits the bill. It provides robust coverage of Cold Fusion's basic long-standing features, but also goes into more detail about maturing technologies like WDDX and Flash Remoting and their place in Cold Fusion applications. Many of the original tags had evolved significantly since I last made use of them, and this book offers thorough explanations of their new features. When it comes to new technologies like WML and Web Services, the book includes explanations not only of Cold Fusion's support for these technologies but also overviews describing their capabilities in general terms. (WAP/WML, for example, doesn't have specialized Cold Fusion support, but the chapter on "Working with WAP and WML Clients" not only explains the intricacies of a WML application but also how to use standard Cold Fusion tags to determine whether a client is WML-capable based on request headers and set the Content-Type appropriately for the response.)
I've definitely found the right book to help me "catch-up" on Cold Fusion, but the book would still be great for neophytes seeking to learn Cold Fusion from the ground up, as well as experienced Cold Fusion developers who need a reference to the product's many new features.
