Reviews

'SkillBuilding with ColdFusion' is Allaire's CD-based multimedia self-study training course, designed to get beginning ColdFusion developers off to a good start. In order to get a good feeling for how effective this course would be for true beginners I gave it to three trainees in my organization to use over the course of recent months. While each of these individuals has many years of database application experience, none of them had any real experience in the world of web development. In addition I, myself, sat through the entire course (except the labs), so that I could examine it from a project manager's perspective.

The stated course objectives are to teach developers how to:

• configure ColdFusion
• configure ODBC
• create ColdFusion application pages, i.e. get comfortable with the edit/save/browse-to-test iterative development cycle
• publish to the web from a database
• build a search interface using forms and conditional logic
• develop web front-ends to manage data (list/add/update)

The course takes you step-by-step through the creation of a nice, simple Human Resources Employee Management application. Don't bother with this training course if you already know how to do a basic list/add/change/delete maintenance application.

I found the course to be quite successful in its objectives, with the exception of its first: configuring ColdFusion. It's really too confusing and frustrating for true beginners to troubleshoot their own installations. Yes, they can follow the indicated steps to verify that their installation is working, if it is in fact working. But if it is not working, the troubleshooting help that is provided can only address the most superficial of problems. It is far less frustrating to let someone with more experience identify the problem, assuming one is available, rather than saddle beginners with these matters. Two of my trainees had installation/configuration problems that required my intervention, primarily because we don't necessarily install everything following standard defaults.

Going through this course requires a working installation of web server software, Cold Fusion Application Server 4, and Cold Fusion Studio 4, i.e. a working Cold Fusion development environment. The test/development-only version of CF Application Server that comes with CF Studio is sufficient. The training CD also includes 30-day trial versions of the CF App Server and CF Studio software, should you need it. The assumption of course is made that you have followed the instructions, installed all the necessary software, and installed all the necessary lab files. (Since technical people rarely read the instructions, I'm sure many will be caught a bit unaware here.)

The course is made up of 12 units, each comprised of several lessons; actually it's only 11 units because the 12^th unit simply summarizes what was accomplished in the earlier units. Each lesson ends with self-assessment quizzes. I already knew this material backwards and forwards before starting the course, and yet I found the multiple-choice quiz questions to be surprisingly subtle. They do test whether you're really paying attention or starting to fall asleep, and can be used as an effective barometer of when you've had enough of one sitting. Real do-it-now-yourself labs at the end of each unit, utilizing a little workbook, provide an additional chance to assimilate the material.

To its credit, the overall course and each unit/lesson segment are very well organized. Complex concepts are explained well. There is ample review and repetition of the material as it builds, and of course you can always go back and replay any small section if something is not clear. The combined use of presentation animations and code demos/walk-throughs is very effective in supporting the narrative. A handy save/resume feature allows so you to leave at almost any point and pick up later where you left off. I found the easily activated Table of Contents very helpful, helping me to keep my bearings.

The course is introduced by Allaire's training director, Carolyn Lightner, and is conducted by experienced instructors Ben Frueh and Shawn Morrissey. Ben starts out at what seems sometimes like an excruciatingly slow pace. True beginners though will likely find both his manner and pace reassuring. You actually get to watch him type the code that he's describing, typing as he talks. Most endearing is watching him occasionally make typing mistakes, and backspacing to correct those mistakes. This makes him appear quite human; in fact, in a very understated kind of way it makes the whole development process seem very approachable.

By the time Shawn takes over in Unit 6 for the 2^nd half of the course, he picks up the pace quite a bit. The demonstrated material is too long already at this point for him to type while you watch, so he takes you directly to the program (.cfm) files that he's already created, and walks you through them, explaining things section by section. My only complaint here is that I would really have preferred it if he had closed the CF Studio resource tab more often, allowing the coding window more screen real estate. Instead, he had only a fairly narrow coding window visible much of the time. The resultant word wrapping sometimes made the code appear unnecessarily unwieldy. Beginners (actually all of us) need the visual cues of indentations to identify code blocks. And wherever possible, students need to see a section of code (vertically) all on the screen at once. This visual sense was unfortunately lost whenever there was heavy use of word wrapping.

Allaire suggests the following prerequisite knowledge before you take this course:

• some HTML/web development (including knowledge of HTML tables and forms)
• some basic understanding of databases and SQL

My staff had to do some crash HTML study before getting started, but they already had sufficient database expertise. Individuals with a programming background will adapt to all of the course's concepts quite readily. However, once conditional logic is introduced in one of the later units, people without any sort of programming background will likely find things a little tougher.

I have several minor criticisms to make regarding this otherwise excellent multimedia presentation.

• Although the quiz material is quite excellent, its navigation is faulty. You should be able to 'go back' if you miss a quiz question and re-read what the choices were. Currently the 'back' option takes you back too far and then you have to hop forward through an entire quiz all over again to get back to your place. Some kind of intra-quiz navigation system is needed.
• There were occasional, noticeable fluctuations in volume between the demo sections and the presentation sections. This was a bit unsettling and annoying, but altogether not a very serious problem.
• Like most books and other training materials these days, there are some mistakes in the material. An errata sheet off the Allaire web site would be a valuable addition.

This SkillBuilding CD is actually good to use in combination with Ben Forta's excellent book, "The ColdFusion 4.0 Web Application Construction Kit". The combination of different approaches to explaining similar material provides excellent reinforcement. Books of course can go places where computers generally do not; but the use of a multimedia presentation can be very engaging and keep you focused whereas it's very easy to let your mind wander off when you try to teach yourself something solely from a book.

In summary, I highly recommend Allaire's SkillBuilding training CD to people who have the prerequisite knowledge and need a way to jump into the world of ColdFusion development, yet are unable to consider Allaire's instructor-led formal training. (A brief review of Allaire's 3-day Fast Track to ColdFusion's web page indicates that Allaire covers a bit more material in that instructor-led course than is covered in the training CD.) For project managers the CD provides a good way to bring trainees on board so you don't have to devote a lot of your time teaching the true basics from scratch.

For the future, I expect that we will continue to see many more fine training offerings from Allaire, in the areas of instructor-led courses, self-study CD's, and the Allaire Alive series. In particular I think that this multimedia CD format would be well suited to intermediate-level topics that would benefit from viewable demonstrations, like the advanced uses of CF Studio and using the interactive debugging environment.

 

Note: Allaire's list of course objectives, prerequisites, course outline and system requirements can be found (as of 4/99) at Allaire's web site at: http://www.allaire.com/Handlers/index.cfm?ID=5061&method=full. The course is currently listed at $295 per developer.

Thank you to Sheila Handler, Allen Schreier, and Michael Hochman, for their assistance on this review.