Ben Forta

If horse-choking is your thing, then this book is for you. Well, it may also be for you if you're looking for a definitive resource on ColdFusion MX web application construction, but, honestly, this book could choke a horse.

Published by Macromedia press back before Adobe bought out Macromedia, this book is THE BOOK when it comes to ColdFusion MX, especially since it's published by the source. Now, don't get me wrong, the source doesn't always publish the best definitive guides. I know show more several poorly documented tools for which I've had to cobble together a cheat tome, so there's nothing really sacrosanct about it being published by Macromedia. What makes it sacrosanct is that it abides by Jacob's First Law of Interesting Computer Books: If a computer book is to be interesting, it must be (a) informative, and (b) entertaining. This book fits that bill nicely.

Included with the book is a trial of ColdFusion MX, which can run client-side indefinitely, but only run server side for a limited time. Likewise, a trial of DreamWeaver and the examples from the book are included. The book is chock full of exercises, following an amusing film-based theme for most of them. There are so many hidden jokes in the examples provided in the book, I'm not even sure I got them all. But those jokes don't in any way deviate from the important, informative content of the book, so if you're a boring person, you can just skip or otherwise ignore statements meant to be both informative and entertaining (just seeing the informative part).

If you want to start learning ColdFusion, this is definitely a place to start. Keep a look out for the latest and greatest version of this book, though, as with Jacob's Second Law of Interesting Computer Books, as time approaches infinity, computer books that are not meant to be entertaining become so, and computer books that are meant to be entertaining become annoying. So get the latest and greatest, so you can have the best mix of information and entertainment. show less

Let me tell you about Pandas DataFrames. DataFrames are wonderful pythonic objects that support clever programming and fast execution via numpy. DataFrames can be masked, joined, manipulated, and plotted however you want. DataFrames rock, and Python is fun.

Unfortunately, real businesses run on SQL. Now, my workflow as a data scientist would be to load all my data into memory and work on in Pandas, and if I don't have enough memory, start a bigger instance on AWS. But sometimes you have to show more use a 70s vintage DBMS, and that means knowing SQL.

Forta's book is a solid introduction to SQL concepts, and how to do selects, filters, and joins. Your exact database will vary, but I find this book to be clear written, a good place to start, and a worthwhile addition to your knowledge base. show less

If you're like me and have been wanting to learn how to use MySQL you've probably looked at all of the other books, including the MySQL documentation website. And if you're like me it's probably confused the heck out of you with trying to figure out where to go next. This book solves that problem. It breaks it down into easy manageable steps on how what it is, how to use it, and when to use it as well as a bunch of other good stuff. It's easy to read, easy to understand and is a handy show more reference to have around, just in case you forget a command or two. I highly recommend it. show less

While the lessons are broken down into a series of fairly easily digestible lessons, if you really want to get the best out of the various samples you will need to spend a bit longer at them but the effort is worth it. Wrox classify this at the Beginning-Intermediate level which seems about right but I reckon it won't hurt to know some basic SQL before coming to the SQLServer specific code in the book and there is no great look at how to design the database in the fisrt place (though you show more would most likely be looking at using already created databases at this level of experience and at that level, it is good, with no actual code errors - there were a number of things that didn't work with SQL 2005 Express but that's my problem :-) show less