Want to learn ColdFusion?

Earlier today Kristen Schofield posted about a new curriculum available for learning ColdFusion. The curriculum consists of two PDFs (not sure if code is included, didn't see it) and the coverage appears to be quite intensive. I'm a bit puzzled by some of the choices in regard to what is considered advanced (lists are advanced?) but there is a large amount of material here - and all 100% free. You can go directly to the materials here:

http://www.adobe.com/education/instruction/teach/cfcurriculum.html

To be clear, this is not just for students. Anyone can download the PDF and start learning immediately. (One quick note for Mac users. Don't try to open the PDFs using Preview. You have to use Reader to view them.)

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Phillip Senn said on 03-18-2009 at 4:55 PM #
	The Introduction mentions the ColdFusion course files at http://www.adobe.com/go/cfcurriculum which is a broken link.

dave said on 03-18-2009 at 5:11 PM #
	damn skim won't even open it! Now I get to enjoy the relentless stream of adobe updater popups, whoo hoo!! haha

Raymond Camden said on 03-18-2009 at 5:22 PM #
	@Phillip: You should contact Kristen. I can't fix broken links on Adobe. :)

Kay Smoljak said on 03-18-2009 at 11:22 PM #
	Their navigation is really naff. I spent about five minutes trying to find where the advanced course was, before realising there's a second tab.

MAQ. said on 03-19-2009 at 5:09 AM #
	Course files are missing and the link mentioned in the PDF: http://www.adobe.com/go/cfcurriculum is not working MAQ.

Steve Drucker said on 03-19-2009 at 5:17 AM #

Ray - Myself and Dave Gallerizzo wrote the Advanced ColdFusion book. This is not new material, it's been available to authorized Adobe training partners for years.

While lists, arrays, and structures are obviously not "advanced", the concepts needed to be covered in the Advanced curriculum since they are not covered in the 3-day intro course and the entire curriculum must flow together to some extent. Adobe (and other training partners) insisted that the courses could not be longer than 3 days in length which ultimately determined what topics got covered as well as the level of detail. Most instructors find it quite challenging to make it through the entire Advanced course within the 24 hours allotted. For example, we actually had two additional units that were written but got cut due to time restrictions -- a pretty good (IMHO) introduction to XML/XSLT and everything you never wanted to know about Flash Forms.

We also wanted to introduce CFEclipse into the course instead of using DW, but that idea was also nixed since the intro course taught DW and it didn't make a lot of sense to hit students with two different IDE's if they were taking the courses back-to-back. We did add a CFEclipse tutorial in our Moving to ColdFusion 8 course, however, and cover another 7 days of material through our AJAX and CF, Moving to CF, and Administering CF courses.

Raymond Camden said on 03-19-2009 at 6:28 AM #

@Maq: Please see my earlier comment. I can't correct broken links on Adobe.com. Please report it to Kristen.

@Steve: Thanks for some background on this. I can see how covering everything under the sun would be a great challenge.

This may be kind of a dumb question - but can people like me use the docs to teach students? If I wanted to start teaching again (in my spare time), would I be allowed to charge people and use this as the curriculum?

Amal said on 03-19-2009 at 6:44 AM #
	this should be a quick remedy my die hard php fanboys friends. i'll surely endorse this link!

Patrick said on 03-19-2009 at 7:06 AM #
	Great! I recently took the beginner course which has started my addiction to CF but was unable to take the Advanced. The course was worth while, but the curriculum is not the type that absolutely needs to be presented in a classroom. If I can find the course files then I should be able to crank through the advanced quicker than it took for the beginner course.

Josh said on 03-19-2009 at 11:02 AM #
	Just a note that they didn't include the advanced Unit 10: scaling applications in the full course PDF, in case anyone is going to download that expect all of them

Nathanael Waite said on 03-19-2009 at 11:21 AM #
	If you are having problems downloading the files. And really really really want them. Use firefox and pause and start the download if it stalls. Eventually you will get the whole file. If you do them all individually you will get them within 5 min.

Patrick said on 03-19-2009 at 11:55 AM #
	@Josh I downloaded the complete package which did have Unit 10, but it is located after Unit 1 and before 2 (because its alphabetically)

Phillip Senn said on 03-19-2009 at 5:39 PM #
	I think the community colleges are always open to people pitching class ideas. It comes down to demand. If you show a coordinator that there is a demand for it, they will schedule a class. Just remember that it will take a long time because decisions are made on a semester basis; sometimes yearly.

Edward Beckett said on 03-19-2009 at 6:22 PM #
	@Ray ... Adobe "should" give you some liberty seeing that you helped write their books ... However ...

Raymond Camden said on 03-19-2009 at 7:48 PM #
	@Edward Becket: The WACK series isn't their book. It's published by... um Peachpitt I think.

Bob said on 03-20-2009 at 6:17 AM #

I teach a community college class in CF and something like this would be great to reference. I currently have a curriculum that I came up with on my own that is somewhat similar to this- let's face it intro material is intro material.

I've found in my experience though that such a wind range of students take my class: everything from students, continuing ed, seniors, and more, that creating material that everyone can get through in the time allotted is challenging.

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