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Book Report - Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion

posted under category: General on March 21, 2011 by Nathan

I am finally up to books that are new in the past few months! This is Matt Gifford's new book Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion. I know Matt, he's a great person, and that alone is reason enough for me to pick up his book. Problem solved. I recommend it. End of discussion.

But, who do I recommend it to?

Object-Oriented Programming in ColdFusion starts off with the lighter stuff, CFML tags and concepts that enable object-oriented development, but then includes enough of the gritty details so you don't hang yourself as soon you realize how much rope you've been given. It is very commendable how much of the important facets of CFC development Gifford fits into such a quick and entertaining first pair of chapters.

After the basics and theoreticals come the practical use. I love the way this book shows how easy it is to gain an advantage using OOP concepts. Real life discussion and demonstration of Beans, DAOs, Gateways and Services to complete the journey.

This book is very practical. It move straight from book to brain to program in a way that most will be able to follow and with a formula that will bring you near-instant success.

If you do ColdFusion development and want to know why there is all this fuss about object-oriented programming, you need this book! If you have some OOP knowledge and wanted to translate it to a real program, get it. If you are struggling with the right way to design your objects, this could be your key to success. Also, if you've been doing OOP for a while and want to know if you are doing it right, this is how you find out.

On the other hand, if you are one of the elite few hackers that invent new names for types of classes because they haven't been invented yet, maybe you don't need it. If you are an OO purist who hates to see when someone uses inheritance over composition, you may not be helping yourself by reading through.

Over all, I hope that this book makes it into every store shelf that holds a copy of any ColdFusion book. The information here is so useful, so helpful, so good, I wish everyone would follow Matt's recipes for successful object-oriented application development - the world of CFML would be a different place. Applications would all make sense. All of our concerns would be separated. All of our knowledge would be well encapsulated in our models. Simplicity would reign. Think of the children! [maybe I'm going too far with that last one... how about this:] Think of me! I don't want to maintain another awful CFML app. Buy this book already! That's my plea. Thank you.

You can learn more about it at the publisher's site, or you can pick it up at Amazon for about $35 today.

Finally, if you want my copy, I plan to give it away at the AZCFUG meeting this Wednesday (March 23). I'm a polite reader and it's in almost perfect condition. Show up if you want it.

Nathan is a software developer at The Boeing Company in Charleston, SC. He is essentially a big programming nerd. Really, you could say that makes him a nerd among nerds. Aside from making software for the web, he plays with tech toys and likes to think about programming's big picture while speaking at conferences and generally impressing people with massive nerdiness and straight-faced sarcastic humor. Nathan got his programming start writing batch files in DOS. It should go without saying, but these thought and opinions have nothing to do with Boeing in any way.
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