JohnBs personal blog

At last, my copy has just arrived following delays by Amazon UK. Time to ‘update’ myself with all the new cool stuff in CF7.

Wahey! I’ve written my first Regular Expression and used it in a live app for the first time thanks to Ben F’s excellent new book, Teach yourself Regular Expressions in 10 minutes.

I haven’t finished the whole book yet (far from it) but just a couple of chapters in and i was well away writing my own RegEx’s and certainly will use them more often. Like most i found them daunting but know they’re actually pretty cool!

My copy of Jeff Peters’ books arrived just yesterday at 160 pages long. As far as i know it’s one of two books that address a specific Cold Fusion topic rather than the single mass of ‘Cold Fusion’ (the other being the CFC book published by Techspedition).

I haven’t worked out which category i fall into that Jeff sets out in the introduction, probably the developer studying for certification and the developer ‘pushing the envelope’. I’ve finished reading the chapter on Lists and so far so good. The problem with learning any language is knowing all the functions that are available to you confidently enough to use them efficiently and correctly, something this book will certainly provide you with. Jeff talks through each list function and then provides a chunk of code to demonstrate the use of each function. At the end of the chapter Jeff provides around 10 real world example usages of list functions from phone number parsing to looping over a list.

Anyway, I’m a few pages into the Arrays chapter (something i definitely need to brush up on) so when i’ve finished that i’ll post a further report.