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ColdFusion Tutorial – Review

 Page 5 — Review


We’ve covered a lot of ground today, but, if you’re reading this tutorial on the clock, you can tell your superiors it was time well spent and more than makes up for the hours you frittered away checking your eBay auctions last week. To summarize, we discussed:

  • How to convince a potential client/employer that you’re conversant in something you know absolutely nothing about
  • What ColdFusion does and why it’s worth the extra bucks
  • Who could benefit from it and who would do better to spend the money on something else, like a shiny, new pony
  • Computer people don’t get enough sex
  • Installing ColdFusion and setting up a DSN
  • Checking your existing databases for ColdFusion compatibility

Tomorrow we’ll start creating ColdFusion templates, talk a little about basic SQL (structured query language), and ColdFusion’s tag library. Until then, why not get up and do something else? Walk around a little. It’s fun!

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ColdFusion Tutorial – Review

Page 6 — Review


As my grandmother used to say, we’re really cooking with gas now, kid. Then she’d light up a Pall Mall.

By now I hope you’ve designed a few template files of your own, and you’ve learned:

  • what a ColdFusion template file (.cfm) is and how it’s going to give you more time to pursue hobbies,
  • what SQL is and how you use it to query a database from a ColdFusion template,
  • that this author wasn’t willing to write a complete tutorial on SQL so he chose to pawn you off onto some other guy’s site,
  • how to use the <CFOUTPUT> tag in your HTML code so that you can place ColdFusion variables like #Item# and #Value# into your page like the big kids do,
  • and how to use the <CFIF> and <CFELSE> tags to make your pages look like you’ve really got it together, even though you don’t.

Now you can sleep until tomorrow. If you’re at work, just open up a spreadsheet, turn your back to your co-workers, and put one hand on your mouse while use the other to prop up your head as you doze. They’ll never suspect a thing. Tomorrow is our final lesson, which will cover more advanced template building. We’ll look at some tips for troubleshooting and speeding up page design using CF.

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ColdFusion Tutorial – Review

Page 5 — Review


In this final day, we learned several techniques to increase nap time, including:

  • how to select, sort, format, and limit data in ColdFusion templates for the betterment of yourself and the world in general;
  • how to use CF to create dynamically generated headers and footers that will allow you to change the look of your site with a simple flick of the wrist and a nod to your admirers;
  • how to troubleshoot pages that you’ve screwed up and where to go when you’re puzzled by ColdFusion’s vague error messages;
  • how to win friends and influence clients by furthering your CF knowledge through Allaire’s online docs and forums;
  • how to ignore Microsoft Office’s dancing paper clip because it’s little more than a pain in the butt;
  • and how posing as a woman on the Web will get results faster than you can say “horny geeks.”

Best of luck on your ColdFusion development. Remember, it’s all about saving time, baby – time better spent on developing Web hoaxes, discussing conspiracy theories, and predicting Y2K doomsday scenarios.

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