I was one of the first reviewers here at Amazon of Ben Forta's books on ColdFusion back in the late 1990's. Much has changed since then. Most things for better. It is amazing how ColdFusion has updated itself and stood the test of time, even when many new languages and platforms have been introduced.

Ben Forta's unique writing style, comprehensive but extremely clear and engaging, is still the same. Ray Camden is another great writer and it shows.



One of the things (probably the most critical one) that has not changed for better has nothing to do with ColdFusion itself. The scarcity of books on ColdFusion 8 is amazing. And now with ColdFusion 9 the situation is worse. Even Adobe itself has not published the three Ben Forta books of this series in time with the release of ColdFusion 9. And as of June 2010 two are still missing! Meanwhile there is no shortage of books on, say, Ruby. ColdFusion doesn't deserve this treatment. And many in the ColdFusion community are probably not happy with this situation. But it may change soon. ColdFusion 9 is the not only the latest but the best ever!



As a recent Gartner's study puts it, "ColdFusion is nearly unique in the industry because it provides a balance of ease of use and advanced features that can support 'entry level' business unit application developers, as well as 'advanced' centralized IT development teams. (..) Most notably, ColdFusion is unmatched by any competitor for ease of use and technical capabilities. (..) Investments in ColdFusion technology are safe for the next five years and potentially longer."



Among other things, ColdFusion 9 has some outstanding object-oriented frameworks, supports components, has a built-in ORM and can be greatly combined with CSS3 and Ajax and other, more recent technologies. Unfortunately the distribution of the chapters in the three books of this series doesn't reflect these improvements well. For the sake of a pretense simplicity much of the meat of ColdFusion 9 is no longer given in the first book and seems somewhat lost (if not incomplete) in the other two books of the series, among less relevant subjects to developers.



Yet Ben Forta's talent shines through in this book. Ray Camden is not left behind either. One can read this book and truly enjoy it. ColdFusion is still so powerful but simple as ever.

If only all technical books were so well written and so exciting to read! A true fun ride. You won't be disappointed.



Update: As of this writing (June 2010) [...] has at least three excellent video tutorials on ColdFusion 9, some aimed at new and some aimed at seasoned ColdFusion developers. Amazon also sells each of these tutorials on CD-ROMs. The book ColdBox by Luis Majano is one of the best sources for the robust, sustainable and modern ColdFusion, where one of the best frameworks available is explained in full with an outstanding documentation. The book Adobe Coldfusion Anthology by Michael Dinowitz and Judith Dinowitz also has some of the latest on ColdFusion written by a world class team of ColdFusion developers.