This book is a fast-paced tutorial to developing ColdFusion applications, with an emphasis on real-world skills. Packed with examples and careful explanations, the book leads you through all the topics relevant to today's ColdFusion developer. This book is for web developers working with ColdFusion 9. If your goal is to get a good grounding in the basics of the language as quickly as possible and put a site together quickly, this book is ideal for you. This book will also help you if you want to learn more about professional programming of ColdFusion. No prior knowledge of ColdFusion is expected, but basic knowledge of general web and software development skills is assumed.

About the Author

John Farrar

John Farrar is a seasoned developer and business owner whose company specializes in web-based solutions. His love for design and solving problems has inspired successful customer projects to a number of open source solutions growing in popularity. He has learned ColdFusion, SQL, CSS/web design, AJAX, and other technologies to help fulfill the customer's technical needs. Yet he is more about the business needs and goals than finding a way to use technology for the sake of technology. That is why he uses the handle and company name "SOSensible". Best practices are great guides but they change over time. John tries to implement and extend best practices to respond to project goals. His focus is to create solutions that are accessible, duplicatable, and sustainable which he calls ADS for short.

Some examples of his ADS compliant efforts are his SOS, COOP, and CFish projects. SOS is an application framework that embraces the personality of the developer. This lets them build applications to run on the same site but in the style they like to code. COOP is covered in this book and splits the code that looks more like an obstacle course into separate pages covering page design and business intelligence in cooperative but separate packages. CFish is his latest focus where he is seeking to bring universal web skinning to ColdFusion developers. All of these are focused on increasing functional accessibility, duplicatable reuse, and sustainable results. Best practices are great but John believes we can do better than that.

These principles and his open attitude have given him many opportunities. He has done work for Brunswick Recreation, Sprint, Apple, and Blue Cross in the enterprise realm. This knowledge has inspired and prepared him to also remember the roots of his childhood where his father was a small business owner. Realizing that small businesses make up over 90 percent of the market, he seeks to extend the practice beyond the enterprise boarders. He has also contributed to several other community projects and enjoyed speaking at national developer conventions over the years.

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