Beginner guide

It would be awesome if you could write a beginner's guide to Cold Fusion for us people who have never used it before. Maybe include some good web hosts that support it.

I will be doing a beginner series that will start simple and then move to more advanced topics as we go.

I am working on the first article in the series right now and I will have it ready very soon.

If you have anything specific that you would like me to cover, please post it here or email me directly.

thanks!

Just keep up the good work!

Things that could be included:

• Recommended reading
• Good CF webhosts

Thanks

Ok, well here is some quick stuff that I can provide until I get the guide put together.

Ben Forta's web site: www.forta.com
This man is the 'King' of ColdFusion. He is the company spokes person and biggest advocate. He know everything there is to know about CF. His CF WACK(Web Application Constuction Kit) books are consider the best to learn CF with. He also has books about WAP and JSP.

Good hosts are www.crystaltech.com, www.hostmysite.com, www.cfdynamics.com.

I will put together my beginners guide that will code snippets, web sites, and books that will help you begin your ColdFusion journey.

How does CF compare with PHP in terms of speed?

If PHP is running as a module of Apache PHP is faster. ColdFusion MX is much faster than any predecessor but is still a bit slower than PHP.

In terms of development speed, ColdFusion has EVERYTHING beat. There is not as much code to do the same thing in other languages.

For example, this is all it takes to query a database and output the results:
<cfquery name="myQuery" datasource="mydsn">
Select myfield from mytable
</cfquery>
<cfoutput query="myQuery">
#myfield#<br>
</cfoutput>

Thats all it takes. Now tell me what other web language is that simple. Even PHP and ASP uses more code to do what the above does.

does that code loop through all the returned rows, or does it just return the first row?

Sorry , that loops through all the returned rows.

Woah! that code is tiny compared to php

Yes it is. That is one reason that I use CF more than other languages is that I can code things faster in CF because the syntax is far simpler than anything else.

This however, does not mean that it is weaker than other langauges. There are alot of programmers that use other langauges that just dog CF. They think its inferior to other languages just because the syntax is simpler.

I hope to show people that CF is not inferior to other languages but another tool to get thier jobs done.

If CF wasnt so damm expensive and also had more hosting companies running the software, id think that coldfusion would really pick up!

Thats the only downside i see of the program

Newbie Question:

Can CF work with a MySQL db?

Can it be installed on Linux?

That's why PHP took off as much as it did. Free (Opensource), multiplatform.

Other reasons may be that the syntax is similar to c/c++ and other programming languages.

Yes ColdFusion can connect to a MySQL database and it does run on Linux.

I have friends that only use CF on Linux because they dislike microsoft so much.

Death to MS! ahah joking! linux r0x0rs tho