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FORTA.COM NEWS
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Hi! It's been quite a while since I sent one of these out. But now that the ColdFusion 8 books are finally all available, here goes ...
CONTENTS
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1: SOFTWARE NEWS
2: BOOK UPDATES
3: BLOG ENHANCEMENTS
4: ON THE ROAD
1: SOFTWARE NEWS
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ColdFusion 8 has been out for half a year or so, and has proven to be an incredibly popular upgrade. From Server Monitoring to simplified Ajax use to .NET integration to PDF support to improved Flex integration to much sought after language enhancements to Exchange integration ... there is something in ColdFusion 8 for everybody! You can learn more about ColdFusion 8 at http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/. My ColdFusion 8 books are all out now, details below.
Flex is Adobe's technology for building Rich Internet Applications that leverage the Flash Player. Flex 3 is in final beta. I am working on a book on Flex 3 (together with fellow Adobe evangelist Prayank Swaroop), but no release date for this one yet. You can learn more about Flex at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/.
AIR is Adobe's soon-to-be-released cross platform application runtime, allowing for powerful desktop applications to be built using Flash/Flex or HTML/JavaScript. Details at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air/.
2: BOOK UPDATES
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The "ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit" started off as a single volume in Cold Fusion 2, become two volumes in ColdFusion 4, and now for ColdFusion 8 we've released three volumes! The first two have been out for a few months, but the third took a while to get to booksellers. Now all three volumes are available (which is why I am sending out this news memo now). The books contain 1,800 pages, but that was not enough room. So, in addition to all of the content in print, we've posted an additional 600 pages in PDF form free for the download. You can find links to all three books, and the free PDF chapters, at http://www.forta.com/books/coldfusion/ (there are links to each of the three books there, as well as details on each).
My "Sams Teach Yourself SQL In 10 Minutes" continues to be one of the best-selling SQL books ever. But as popular and as successful as that book it, it does have some limitations: 1: In covering all of the major DBMSs, coverage of DBMS specific features and functionality had to be kept to a minimum. 2: To simplify the SQL taught, the lowest common denominator had to be found, SQL statements that would (as much as possible) work with all major DBMSs. This requirement necessitated that better DBMS specific solutions not be covered. 3: While basic SQL tends to be rather portable between DBMSs, more advanced SQL most definitely is not. As such, that book could not cover advanced topics like triggers, cursors, stored procedures, access control, transactions, and more, in any real detail. To address this problem I created two spin-off titles, "MySQL Crash Course" (on MySQL 4 and 5) and more recently "Sams Teach Yourself SQL-Server T-SQL In 10 Minutes" (on SQL Server 2000 and later). These books are all available now, go to http://www.forta.com/books/sql/ to learn more.
3: BLOG ENHANCEMENTS
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My blog is at http://forta.com/blog. By popular request, I have added e-mail subscription support powered by FeedBurner. To subscribe, click on the link in the blog (or just go to http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=1212491&loc=en_US). The blog feed is also now powered by FeedBurner, and the new feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BenForta (although the old URL still works).
4: ON THE ROAD
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In the next few months I'll be speaking at events in England, Scotland, Brazil, India, as well as in the U.S. Keep an eye on my homepage (http://www.forta.com/) for details, and I hope to see you at one of the events!
That's all for now!
--- Ben
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