Fusebox: Developing Coldfusion Applications 1st Edition

This book covers almost all aspects of FuseBox 3.0, FuseDoc 2.0 and FLiP. It covers most areas as thoroughly as possible in a single volume book. Some areas are glossed over, but, at least, they are mentioned. Several areas could have been dealt with in a little more depth, such as MVC, Prototyping, nested layouts and reusability using the CFModule tag. This book is much better, overall, than "Discovering Fusebox 3 with ColdFusion" by Hal Helms and Joh Quarto-vo Tivadar. That book fills in a few of the gaps left by Peters and Papovich's, but dealt too deeply into the "Techspedition Intranet Contact Manager" application. Peter's book does a good job of explaing the core files and making strong recommendations while still leaving room for accomodating situations out of norm. It was well written and well organized. The appendices are helpful as summarization material.

This method of writing web application, once you get get the idea of how it works, will blow you away. This book will get you over the learning curve, and is a great tool to help your team, if you work in a team environment, get producing Coldfusion dynamic applications quickly. This book helps you explain over and over what you already know but need to put into clear concise words to others developers showing "WHY" fusebox in Coldfusion.Plus this book provides real working applications us on his site showing this technique which you can download and use as a beginning collection of provable code.Like someone else said in these reviews, "I wish this was available when I started". It wasn't and over a year afterwords I'm finally understanding clearly what I've been using and why and have the reference I need to explain it to others. Important book is your doing coldfusion development.

got the book, implemented FB, used it for a while and then killed the web project and off to another...re-sold the book since we opted not to use FB.thx

This book goes from theory to nuts-and-bolts and back again on how to design, implement, use, manipulate, and manage code written in the Fusebox method. While I particularly like Wireframes and FLiP, my favorite Fusebox piece by far are FuseDocs.The book spends a fair amount of time explaining each piece of the Fusebox methodology and gives plenty of examples. There is a companion website, which is more than handy. The book is broken into two sections: coding and the life cycle of the code. Each section seems to have a bit different focus, and I imagine that the Life Cycle Process section is more immediately attractive to managers and independent developers. Yet I am glad to find both pieces here, juxtaposed. It keeps me from losing the forest for the trees in the coding section, and from getting too far removed from the actual work at hand in the FLiP section.According to the authors, Fusebox was developed for use by small teams with a theoretical manager somewhere. I can see how this methodology would bring focus to and demystify any application development. But I have to write that while teams might have been the target audience, contractors will come to love this. Fusebox and especially its FuseDoc element empower the novice contractor to tackle the Big Project that has been landed at long last and produce results without becoming overwhelmed. Far more importantly, though, it allows a developer familiar with FuseBox to speak a fluid language about time, task, and integration. As someone who finds herself after lunch looking over code written before breakfast and wondering what the heck I was trying to do, FuseDocs are a godsend.Fusebox methodology, while written for ColdFusion, isn't limited to the ColdFusion world. One could easily pick up any FuseDoc and translate it to PHP. This portability of the process renders the Fusebox methodology a staying power we haven't seen in a long time. And while extreme programming has much to recommend it, it doesn't result in a task-oriented product in the same way that Fusebox does. The Fusebox process seems to lend itself to real world applications, development and concerns in a way I haven't found in other methodologies. It also has the added bonus of becoming widely known, and could approach a standard for web-based application development.As a developer, I found the book well written as well, and one that addresses each area discretely. I personally read it form front to back, but the material seems to hold up to a piecemeal reading as well (this chapter, that section, or this reference). All this means that the Fusebox book will be kept close at hand and used often. Buy it, and don't be afraid to write in it, dog-ear it, and put flags where they make the most sense for you. I truly believe that use of the Fusebox methodology singly or by whole teams will result in programmers who get to spend more time doing what they love, and doing it in an environment they enjoy.

I have been thinking about jumping the Fusebox wagon for years now and must say I am thankful for this book. The authors make a good case for Fusebox 3, and show the way forward.My biggest gripe with this book, however, is that when I first sat down (after the first full read-through...) to start building a FB app I had problems getting started. I tried to locate the starting points in the book - but this is really no roadmap to Fusebox. You'll still have to do a lot of figuring out yourself. But then again, Fusebox is covered in great detail on the web and the authors are part of the core of that community - and the book _does_ cover lots of good tools you can get for free which _will_ help you along.Fusebox is a Very Good Thing for ColdFusion, and I would have given this book 5 stars if it had provided perhaps at least one brief summary, a step-by-step, perhaps, on how to start your first Fusebox app.It's a great book, though. If you're ready to dive into Fusebox 3, this will save you time compared to learning everything from the web.