Products
Rob Brooks-Bilson's Blog
Dave Shuck had a great post today that discussed the seeming lack of content focused on helping those new to ColdFusion development. Inspired by his post, I decided to put together a list of online resources that contain lots of good information, geared toward those who are new to ColdFusion.
Getting Started Tutorials from Adobe
Getting Started Guide to ColdFusion MX 7 and Its Resources
Connecting to a Database with ColdFusion MX 7
Displaying Database Data on a Web Page
Multimedia Tutorial Series: Building Your First Database Application with ColdFusion MX 7
ColdFusion MX Web Application Construction Kit: Databases and SQL
Building Advanced Queries in ColdFusion MX
A Beginner's Guide to Using Stored Procedures with ColdFusion
Learning Stored Procedure Basics in ColdFusion MX
Faster and safer database queries using the CFQUERYPARAM tag
Validating Input Parameters with ColdFusion
Creating Better Forms Faster with ColdFusion MX 7
Websites
Adobe ColdFusion MX 7 LiveDocs (documentation)
CF QuickDocs
ColdFusion Cookbook (problems/solutions)
CFLib (UDFs)
EasyCFM (tutorials, reviews, forums, community)
House Of Fusion (mailing lists, articles, tutorials)
Tek-Tips Forums
Blogs
Ray Camden's Blog (general tips, guides, ask a jedi series)
Listservers
CF-Newbie Listserv
While this list is by no means exhaustive, if you know of any other sites that should be here, let me know and I'll be happy to add them.
Also, more to Dave's point - while a list like this is a good starting point for nudging new developers in the right direction, what's really needed is more blog and list content geared toward new and lesser experienced developers. Taking that to heart, I'm planning to do more blogging geared toward the beginner crowd.
Aura skin for Raymond Camden's BlogCFC inspired by Joe Rinehart & Steven Erat. This blog is running version 5.9.004.
Great job - good to see someone putting together such a list!
Best Wishes,
Peter
If you want to see the liveDocs on steroids you gotta use http://www.cfquickdocs.com, it is basically the same content but the ease of navigating the whole thing is worth visiting the site.
The other one is a tech forum where people post a couple questions every day on all levels of coldfusion, if newbies want to learn they can go there, check the archives and try to find a solution for the problem, if they give up then they can go back to the post and find the accepted answer.
After a couple of weeks of doing this one can start mastering CF without any problems
http://www.tek-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=232
For the experts or more advanced developers, is a good way to help the community and share more knowledge about CF.
David,
I debated including cflib on the original list and initially decided against it. However, I've gone ahead and added it in as I think it is an excellent resource for anyone trying to learn about UDFs, in addition to its value as a code library.
Fernando,
Thanks for the links. I've gone ahead and added them to the list.
Yep. I don't know whether it is a true "beginners resource" which is I'm guessing why you didn't originally put it on the list but it has saved my ass algorithmically more than any other one site! Some great little UDFs there. And remember, if it doesn't do what you want you can always tweak it.
My IBO got its original query loader courtesy of a hack of one of Pete Farrels great UDFs on cflib!
Any chance you'd consider the simpler captcha as suggested on Charlie Areharts blog? It is a really simple tweak - 2 mins max. Of course, if you've seen his post and decided against, feel free to ignore the suggestion!!!
The simplified captcha is on my todo list. The current one gets me every 3 or four posts!
-Rob
You know, this is the sort of thing where it might be better as a resource of its own rather than a blog post (just like Brian Rinaldi eventually did with his opensource CF list). Then it could be pointed to by Ray's portal, and it could grow by combined efforts like the work you and Dave have done.
Maybe as a Google notebook? Those can be set to allow multiple contributors (controlled). Anyone have any other ideas?
Oh, and as for the captcha, Rob, glad to hear you too think it would be nice to simplify it. As for getting it done, I understand the reluctance, opening and editing the lyla.xml file. Maybe I need to alter my blog to just offer the file as I modified it, for those who haven't otherwise touched it. Then you could just download and replace it. :-)
http://www.coldfusionportal.org
I finally updated the captcha. Thanks again for the XML file. I'll also look at getting a more permanent "guide", Ray style for the resources.
Ray, I'll add the portal during my next update.
Mark, welcome to the ColdFusion community. We're glad to have you.