BKWDWCF3.RVW   980111

"Web Databases with Cold Fusion 3", John Burke, 1998, 0-07-913092-5,
U$49.95
%A   John Burke
%C   300 Water Street, Whitby, Ontario   L1N 9B6
%D   1998
%G   0-07-913092-5
%I   McGraw-Hill Ryerson/Osborne
%O   U$49.95 800-565-5758 fax: 905-430-5020 louisea@McGrawHill.ca
%P   453p. CD-ROM
%T   "Web Databases with Cold Fusion 3"

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   BKWDWCF3.RVW   980111