Note: This blog post is from 2008. Some content may be outdated--though not necessarily. Same with links and subsequent comments from myself or others. Corrections are welcome, in the comments. And I may revise the content as necessary.
I was tooling around the web today and came across something that I think many may find really helpful: free complete (class-length) tutorials on CF, MySQL, SQL (the language), Ajax, and lots more. They're all offered as standalone sites from the training company,
Webucator.
Check out the substantial table of contents on each of the following free Webucator tutorials (Update: I updated these URLs in 2019, at request of webucator, as the URLs had changed):
The CF tutorial, for instance, has 14 chapters, each with several subtopics, and they range from basics to intermediate concepts. (It does not seem to have been updated for CF 8, but does reference some CF7 topics, like Application.cfc.) For many, it's seems it would be a great resource.
Many other topics
But maybe you know all about the CF topics listed. Fair enough. There are several other similarly substantial topics, listed on the left of each page, after the table of contents for each class. Besides the CF, Ajax, Javascript, CSS, HTML, SQL, Java, and MySQL topics mentioned above, they include PHP, XML, XSLT, web accessibility, and more.
Do note that each class has several sections/pages
While each course is quite complete and has many sections, one bummer is that if one is not paying attention and gets to the bottom of each section/page, they may think that's the end. There's no link there to the next page/section. Instead, you have to notice that offered on the left nav bar back near the top of the page. Just a minor quibble for otherwise free training.
Check them out for yourself
All that said, I haven't actually read through any of them in detail. Still, they're from a training company (which teaches full-length classes on the same topics), and I'm confident that they've worked hard to make the materials accurate. One might wish they offered a place for clear feedback/comments, in case readers might be able to help improve things, but it's their call if they want to manage that sort of effort, of course.
The only real negative (some may feel) is that the "solutions" to various exercises are not offered online. Instead, the link for them indicates that the class materials can be licensed. Of course, the free online courseware is clearly a loss-leader, a promotional effort to bring you to their site to learn more about their many training offers.
Seems a fair trade to me.
