From the book lists at Adware Report:

All information current as of 11:53:28 Pacific Time, Saturday, 19 March 2005. Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion Applications    by Jeff Peters / Nat Papovich   Paperback:     Pearson Education     18 June, 2002    US$29.10       Usually ships in 24 hours Click the button below to . . .      (which will add the book to your Amazon U.S.A. "Shopping Cart") . . . or use your browser's Back button to return to the search-list page.

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Editorial description(s):

Book Info
Read this book if you want to eliminate frustrations and roadblocks in your projects, such as unmanageable complexity, wasteful redundancy of effort, time-consuming code maintenance, and slow development speed. Softcover


From the Publisher
Jeff Peters and Nat Papovich have carefully crafted this book into the most comprehensive Fusebox resource currently available. Whether you've been using Fusebox for a while or are just getting started, you're sure to find information here that will expand your skill set. Jeff and Nat are members of the Fusebox Council, and are actively involved in the Fusebox community. If you're using Fusebox with your ColdFusion applications (or have been considering it), you'll avoid pitfalls by using this book.


From the Inside Flap
Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion Applications is the only book of its kind on the market. This book provides a soup-to-nuts presentation of the Fusebox framework and the Fusebox Lifecycle Process (FLiP). Covering Fusebox 3.0, it takes you through three major sections. First, the book examines the history and reasoning behind Fusebox. Second, it explores the Fusebox core file, fuse file organization, and processing logic. Third, it looks at FLiP. Written for Fuseboxers of every stripe, from application architect to fusecoder, this book is the most complete collection of Fusebox information available. It's a must-have for your bookshelf.


From the Back Cover
Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion Applications is the most complete resource for learning to develop ColdFusion applications with the Fusebox standard. Fusebox is a free web application standard that was created as a standard for writing web applications. (This methodology is supported and promoted by Allaire/Macromedia.) The aim of this methodology is to reduce the high failure rate of these applications. If a team of developers uses Fusebox to write ColdFusion applications, the applications will be written more quickly and effectively because they will all code according to the same standard. Fusebox's popularity is growing daily and will grow even more with the next release of ColdFusion. The authors explain concepts such as the Fusebox lifecycle process, testing, and deployment. The appendixes are full of extra Fusebox references and resources. The web site includes databases, files, and code from this book; current enhancements and revisions to the material in this book; links to other Fusebox resources; the latest updates to the core of Fusebox, for any version.


About the Author
About the AuthorsAbout the Authors Jeff Peters has been messing around with computers since "terminal" meant a teletype. He is currently a program manager with Operational Technologies Services in Vienna, Virginia, a member of the Fusebox Council, and an occasional seminar speaker and instructor. When Jeff's not pushing bits around, he can often be found remodeling rooms with his wife and daughter, or noodling around on bass and guitar. Jeff maintains a Fusebox-related web site at http://www.grokfusebox.com. Nat Papovich, as a member of the Fusebox Council that oversees the development of the standard, has contributed to the formalization of many popular Fusebox concepts and was instrumental in the release of version 3.0. Nat is a Senior Partner and Lead Architect at fusium, offering application development and project consulting, Fusebox training and mentoring, along with tools and products for developers. In addition to being a frequent speaker at ColdFusion events and conferences nationwide, he has written and contributed to many other Fusebox publications. Currently residing in Portland, Oregon, Nat enjoys climbing, biking, and astronomy. He can be reached at [email protected]. ) Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.


Book Description


Developers face a constant struggle to launch projects on time and under budget, especially without pulling all-nighters. Fusebox helps ensure successful projects by providing a framework that serves as a base for applications. It's a standard process that makes projects more manageable and simplifies maintenance and requests for change during development. With this book, you'll learn to make ColdFusion applications reliably successful by following a standardized system. In addition, relying on the Fusebox framework to help plan and organize your ColdFusion code will allow you to write increasingly complex and specialized applications.



Jeff Peters and Nat Papovich, both members of the Fusebox Council, share their extensive experience in this book. They'll teach you to use Fusebox with your ColdFusion applications and develop a set of best practices for managing web projects. Read this book if you want to eliminate frustrations and roadblocks in your projects, such as unmanageable complexity, wasteful redundancy of effort, time-consuming code maintenance, and slow development speed.






Reader review(s):

Excellent. A must read for anyone interested in Fusebox, November 3, 2002
Whether you want to learn about the intricacies of the Fusebox core files; or you want to understand how Fusebox can help you become a better ColdFusion� developer, the book Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion� Applications by Jeff Peters and Nat Papovich is well worth the read.

This book covers the basics of the Fusebox framework and FLiP (Fusebox Lifecycle Process) methodology to the more advanced features of Fusebox such as nested circuits and layouts.

Beginners will appreciate the authors' abilities to convey complex ideas through examples that relate to real-world development experiences. Through their examples, it is easy to see how using FLiP and Fusebox can ease and even eliminate the common pitfalls that developers go through when coding their applications.

The book starts out by explaining why a framework and methodology are beneficial to creating successful applications, and will give the reader some insight into the relationship between the developer and the client. This is a recommended read for all managers.

The expertise of the authors really shows in chapters 3 and 4 as they delve into the complexities of the Fusebox core files. This section may be overly complex for the Fusebox beginner, but is an insightful read for those who already have experience creating Fusebox applications. If you were ever curious about the functionality of the code that makes up the Fusebox core files, this section will give you greater understanding of how Fusebox works.

Chapters 5-10 walk the reader through all of the parts that a developer is responsible for when creating a Fusebox application. The basics such as the fuses (ColdFusion templates) and XFA's (eXit FuseActions's or Triggers) are covered in chapters 5 and 6.

Chapter 7 covers Fusedocs, a documentation standard developed by Hal Helms. Even if you are not going to adopt the Fusebox framework for application development, learning Fusedoc's is time well spent. The Fusedocs chapter is a great reference tool that should be kept near your keyboard as you learn the names and attributes of the elements that make up the documentation. Appendix C details the Fusedoc dtd for those interested in the nitty-gritty of how Fusedocs are structured.

Chapters 8-10 detail the advanced features of Fusebox that make it such a powerful and useful framework. The chapter on nested circuits discusses how to set up an application to take advantage of the way in which circuits communicate with each other. With nesting comes inheritance, and nested layout which is the subject of Chapter 9.

Nested layouts are one of the more difficult concepts for new Fusebox developers to grasp. The book walks step-by-step though the concept of nested layouts and shows code examples of how nested layouts could be applied to an application.

Because nesting of both circuits and layouts can be difficult to put into practice, Chapter 10 looks at some of the issues that developers may encounter when utilizing these advanced features.

Part 3 of this book goes into the details of the Fusebox Lifecycle Process (FLiP). Developers who are responsible for the initial requirements gathering and architecture of an application will find Part 3 a useful read. For project managers who have struggled with bringing an application from concept to completion, chapters 11-16 are an important read.

The remaining chapters in Part 3 (17-19) describe some Fusebox best practices, and sum up why Fusebox is useful in a dialog between two of the characters introduced at the beginning of the book

Fusebox: Developing ColdFusion� Applications is very well written, and a must read for anyone interested in using Fusebox to develop ColdFusion based applications.

Big picture to lines of code: this is a great resource, August 19, 2002
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.

Good but preachy, August 5, 2002
I thought the book did a very good job explaining FuseBox, but it did get preachy sometimes. There was also too much "story telling" for me.

I thought Discovering FuseBox by Helms was better because I like books that give me information without wasting my time.

Not what I was looking for, January 30, 2003
This book is more about process than it is about code.

Not much help, October 18, 2002
If you are new to fusebox you will probably read this book cover to cover and step away knowing nothing of practical value. This book could be useful as a high level reference for an experienced fuseboxer but not much else.

Good; I wish it had been published last October..., July 24, 2002
Jeff Peters and Nat Papovich have both been major forces in the development of Fusebox -- a methodology for developing web based applications in an efficient and organized fashion. While build and primarily used with ColdFusion, Fusebox can also be used with PHP or JSP code. [There is nothing available for ASP - arguably the most popular web scripting environment - due to limitations in the ASP language. ASP is unable to dynamically include files.]

This book provides a good introduction to Fusebox 3, as well as the FLiP methodology. They spend the first 100 pages or so walking through every line of code that is executed to initiate a fuse request (the 300+ line core file, the support files, etc.), then get into details of how to write your own fuse code, and how it interacts with the FB3 files.

They then spend a decent amount of time with FLiP -- the Fusebox Lifecycle Process. This I found less compelling, because much of FLiP is really oriented towards contract web site development. While some is applicable to the corporate environment in which I work, other parts really don't fit all that well. Nonetheless, I feel that Peters & Papovich do a good job explaining the concepts behind FLiP, as well as the various software tools which are available now to support it. They provide quick demonstrations of wireframing & prototyping tools, a visual mind mapping tool, and a tool to build fuse-level unit testing harnesses.

I found I really liked the approach of this book -- diving right into the deep end of the pool and working through the core files line by line. I'd initially gotten into Fusebox about a year ago, learning it on my own from what was available online. A few months later, I was fortunate enough to have Hal Helms teach a class in my company. And I've been developing in Fusebox almost exclusively since then. Despite this, I'd never spent much time actually working my way through the core files. In doing so through this book, I still picked up some interesting tips and tricks, and got my eyes opened on just how some of the code actually worked.

In short, I think I'll build better Fusebox apps with the info I gained from this book. Now, if I can just get myself to take the time to actually write up the Fusedocs... :-)

You'll get a lot out of this book, July 12, 2002
This book covers developing web applications using Fusebox and ColdFusion. However, it covers much more than the coding fundamentals. The strength of this book, aside from being an complete reference for Fusebox, is that it also covers FLiP, the Fusebox Life Cycle. What this means to you is you will not only learn how to develop Fusebox applications, but also learn a tried and true development process from concept to launch. This is an invaluable feature and I'm very happy to have this reference on my desk. Even if you choose not to read the FLiP chapters, you'll get a lot out of this book.

Good book, if you want to know about Fusebox, July 3, 2002
This is a well written and easy to read book, with a somewhat evangelical tone about Fusebox methodology for writing Web applications in ColdFusion. For those who don't know about Fusebox, or want to find in detail about what it is, it is excellent. For those who have used Fusebox in the past, it is a good reference for Version 3 of Fusebox, with all of the major concepts explained in clear, English prose, with not too much techno-jargon.

Whether the book succeeds in convincing everyone that Fusebox is the way to go is, however, questionable. Evangelism usually succeeds when the message is simple, or the results easily obtainable. Fusebox methodology is not the panacea that its proponents would have us believe. Its learning curve is steep, its benefits limited to certain types of applications and to sizable teams of developers. This book seems to address itself mostly to them, and it will have a hard time converting those developers who toil alone or in small teams. It is to be commended though for trying.

THIS IS FUSEBOX 3 !!!, August 23, 2004
Fusebox is on version 4 as of 8/2004. This book is for Fusebox 3 ONLY!

Get a Fusebox 4 book if you are starting from scratch with FB4 as 3 and 4 are VERY different.

I will let others discuss the quality of this book - it is mostly a moot point for someone wanting the full benefits of FB.



The missing link to an awesome way to code in Coldfusion, January 18, 2003
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.

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