I’m really glad to see this book (by Matt Gifford) mostly because it’s a book with a somewhat narrow focus around Coldfusion.  When I say ‘narrow’ I’m certainly not implying that CF or OOP is a narrow topic, but more or less that this is a book about Coldfusion programming that focuses its scope giving it more depth than a comprehensive study of how to program using CF.  You know, it’s not often that a new CF book rolls through my ‘Just Released’ column on my Safari library account.  So I was very pleased to see this one slide up the list.  On the other side of the token however, CF has an incredible blogging community that almost single-handedly serves as the gold mine of CF knowledge.

I’ll just quickly throw out first the negative critique to get it out of the way so no one dwells on it.  Minor at best, I noticed a number of editorial mistakes around grammar and spelling, especially towards the end of the book.  Nonetheless, as stated, trivial at best.

To be a book on programming, I found it to be an easy read with simple and cleanly explained concepts that can be pretty difficult to explain.  I particularly loved the focus on the use of components.  I myself am a 99% fan of CFCs and a 1% fan of a few custom tag wrappers that I’ve really liked.  The flow and organization of the book really worked for me.  The first three chapters are critical in that you should be able to formulate a stable self-documenting CFC that fully encapsulates its logic before learning how to use a set of CFCs in the larger scheme of an application.  Hence, the focus of the remaining four chapters.

Overall, I’m glad I took the time to read it and I definitely feel I have a more stable grounding in not only implementing an OO application, but more so understanding what it is I’m doing and why.