How should I train myself?

Report · Jun 24, 2010

Hello,

I'm just starting out with CF and have been doing light dev work with Visual Studio. Just to help out my understanding of the whole Adobe platform here before I figure out where to spend the hours of personal training.

I'd like to lay out my goals and ask for your confirmation on the methodology before I start.

I have a band and a consulting business. Both are currently .net, so they kickoff with the default.net, have embedded html and also a tad bit of server side code. I'm converting away from the platform because I felt the IDE was too difficult.

I'd like to start with the band web site and would like a flash introduction, probably a very simple one just to accomplish how this is done on the front end of the band web site. Then I'd like to have the typical things like biography, schedule and music areas.

I have Adobe CS4 designer premium and so will I be developing within dream weaver? Does this IDE have the ability to do frames and such without server side code or will I need to actually create a dreamweaver web site with the coldfusion?

I will play with basic publishing first for html, and such but I just want to know where this is all headed.

If you were me, (light background with Visual studio) and you have my band site goal, and don't want to use templates, how would you suggest I train myself and in what order?

Thanks very much!!!

Patrick

Report · Jun 24, 2010

The first thing to get straight is all the tools and what they really do.

Flash is a plugin that runs in a browser. Flash Profession is the IDE in your studio that you can use to create the .swf files that are displayed with the flash plugin that runs in a browser. You use some HTML to tell the browser how to run the Flash plugin.

Dreamweaver is also an IDE that is used to develop web pages. It is just an fancy (some say bloated, but that is personal preference) editor for the text files that make up web pages. It can edit HTML files, CFML files (ColdFusion - see below), ASP, JSP, XML or any text file you care to point it at.

ColdFusion is an application server that works with a web server to process CFML pages and generate dynamic output to be returned to a client. This output is often HTML, but can be CSS, JavaScript, PDF, Images, XML and more.

Now that this is out of the way.

Starting with HTML is a great idea. As mentioned HTML is often the desired output of a CFML ColdFusion application. And having a good foundation on how that output should be makes it much easier. You will also want to look up Cascading Stylesheets (CSS) and JavaScript if you plan to have more then just basic, static web pages.

When you are ready to move into ColdFusion you will need a ColdFusion server to process the CFML. For development and training version you can download the ColdFusion server and install it for free, just leave the license field blank when you install it. But when you are ready to publish your work for the world to see, you need a licensed copy of the ColdFusion server working with the web server. There are plenty of hosting providers out there that provide ColdFusion support. Some of them are pretty inexpensive these days. IF you are building and mainting your own server, then a license runs some real money. Just over a grand for the basic license if you are not upgrading a previously licensed version. But I would be surprised you would want to go this route.

There can be some difficulties for first timer setting up a complete ColdFusion development stack. Installing the servers and IDE's and getting them all talking together and working smoothly is fairly straight forward, once you got the idea. But at first can seem daunting and unfriendly when the errors start showing up if one does not get it right on the first try.

We are here to help, don't be afraid to ask question. Specific ones are generally easier to answer the broad ones.

Good Luck and Welcome to the CF Community. We may not do much that can't be done with other technologies but we often do it faster and friendlier in my experience!

Report · Jun 24, 2010

Most cold fusion applications are a combination of database stuff, cold fusion programming stuff, and html/css/js/etc.

If you don't know what a normalized database is, that is the most important thing to learn. A well designed database prevents all sorts of problems later on. To learn it, I have heard good things about the book, Database Design for Mere Mortals.

Assuming your application will include a database, the next most important thing to learn is sql. If you think you need improvement in this area, I have heard good things about the book, Teach Yourself SQL in 10 Minutes by Ben Forta.

There are lots of books out there to learn the actual Coldfusion programming stuff. I was already a programmer when I learned it, and I learned it by reading other people's source code. If you need a book, I have heard good things about the Web Application Construction Kit by Ben Forta.

check forta.com for Ben Forta's books.

For the html/css/js/etc stuff, last time I checked, there were good tutorials at webmonkey.com and htmlgoodies.com. I learned js from the book Teach Yourself Javascript in 24 Hours. It's a good book.

Report · Jun 24, 2010

So, as you can see, Dan did all of his SQL and JavaScript learning in 24 hours and 10 minutes.