I have been blogging ColdFusion for several years and Mark’s publisher kindly sent me a copy of his new book to review.

Railo 3 Beginner’s Guide is a great introduction to the ColdFusion language and using it on the free Railo Server.

ColdFusion is a powerful and useful language for people who just want to create web applications. These applications typically have database back-ends and security requirements and these are handled nicely by the free Railo server and the book explains clearly how to do this.

ColdFusion is typically used by internal IT teams who want a more productive language than PHP and it is likely that you will have access to your own production servers and databases. However, if you do not, there are plenty of Railo hosting services available or you could put it on an Amazon Elastic Beanstalk instance or EC2 server.

I personally use Railo on Tomcat for all my smaller projects and I would recommend this book to anyone who is considering this approach.