Book details of 'Web Databases With Cold Fusion 3'

Title	Web Databases With Cold Fusion 3
Author(s)	John Burke
ISBN	0079130925
Language	English
Published	December 1997
Publisher	Computing McGraw-Hill

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Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Often a book with this kind of title is a sales brochure, or documentation replacement, for the eponymous product. I'm not sure that this book can fall into either of those two slots, since, even having read it, I still don't know what Cold Fusion really is. Cold Fusion appears to be a kind of low level middleware, taking CGI (Common Gateway Interface) forms data, submitting it, along with SQL (Structured Query Language) commands, to various database programs, and formatting the results in HTML (HyperText Markup Language) for display on Web pages. But in providing short overviews of a whole host (you should pardon the expression) of other programs, they seem to have missed out on providing a description of what Cold Fusion is and does, and, frankly, nothing in the rest of the book interests me severely enough to make me want to install the 30 day eval version provided and try to figure out for myself what it is. Do we find a description in Chapter one? No, we have a quick and dirty short course in HTML. Chapter two starts off with a brief and somewhat misleading "history" of DOS and Windows. A number of statements in the piece are flatly wrong. We may be able to blame the limitation of the Digital Alpha processor to 32 bits on a typo: certainly the sentence makes more sense if you substitute the correct architecture size. It then goes on to explain how to install Windows NT. Chapter three tells you how to install the Microsoft Internet Information Server, Netscape's Enterprise Server, O'Reilly's Website Professional, MS SQL Server, and Cold Fusion. You can generate an automated email with what you learn in chapter four, although it's not much more sophisticated than what you can do with Pegasus Mail. Chapters five through nine give brief descriptions of MS Access, Visual dBASE, Personal Oracle 7, Paradox, and Visual FoxPro. Most of these databases, and most others, can generate HTML content rather simply by using the proper report generation commands. Chapter ten moves up a level in the database world and mentions Cold Fusion specifically, but still doesn't give much more than some isolated examples of Cold Fusion commands in HTML. Chapter eleven tells us of new features in Cold Fusion 3, but *still* doesn't tell us what Cold Fusion is! In chapter twelve we learn what SQL is (in case we had forgotten since chapter ten), and even get a few Cold Fusion "templates" that use it. These appear to be simply SQL commands with some Cold Fusion commands prepended. Chapter thirteen does the same thing at a higher level, as does fourteen. Fifteen introduces Crystal Reports and sixteen adds graphics from Crystal Reports. Finally, in chapter seventeen, we start to look at programming in Cold Fusion. (It still doesn't tell us what Cold Fusion is, although it says that Cold Fusion isn't a programming language as such.) Along with chapters eighteen and nineteen there is a lot of looking at conditionals and loops. Chapter twenty looks at Javascript. Chapter twenty-one looks at frames. As is usual with many technical works, each chapter starts with a listing of contents. Unfortunately, the listing bears no relation to the list of sub-topics given in the table of contents, no relation to any level of header to be found within the chapter, and, as far as I can tell, very little relation to reality. Magic seems to play a large role in all of this. Client/server is magic. TCP/IP is magic. Perhaps they figure that the reader will magically figure out what they are talking about. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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Book description:

Running Databases on the Internet with Cold Fusion 3 revels the power and flexibility of Cold Fusion and the tremendous possibilites when working with various database products, including Access, DBASE, FoxPro, Paradox, Oracle 7, and SQL Server. The book develops a new paradigm - unlimited information access for any user regardless of source, whether it be text, graphic, or sound file - and shows how the new paradigm supports unlimited database and spreadsheet access with Cold Fusion.