The course itself starts students off with an application (the Coffee Valley application as it should look upon completion of the Fast Track to ColdFusion course) that they will enhance throughout the course of three days. Students build a shopping cart application using ColdFusion Components and user-defined functions to manipulate the complex data object (shopping cart) they have created. They also implement query-caching strategies and query-of-queries to boost the performance of Coffee Valley, add charting and search functionality, create a "next-n" interface product catalog, and practice other techniques to enhance the site's performance and functionality.

The end result is that students leave the class with an impressive skill set. First and foremost they develop an excellent understanding of how to work with complex data - a requirement for building robust applications with CFML - including how to work with the variable scopes used by the ColdFusion Application Server under the hood. They understand how to effectively use locking and caching to optimize performance and stability in dealing with databases, and how to leverage code reuse techniques (custom tags, UDFs, and CFCs) in order to be more productive and to better-architect applications. In addition to these fundamental skills, developers practice using Verity to search documents and database data, use error-handling tags to build self-repairing code, query existing recordsets in order to boost performance by minimizing trips to the database, and more.

Advanced ColdFusion MX Development is not a course for beginners. It is recommended that developers have three months of solid ColdFusion development experience under their belt before enlisting in ACFD, though anyone comfortable with the basics of CFML should be able to successfully complete the class.

Not only do I recommend this class to developers ready to take their skills to the next level, but also to those developers who already consider themselves advanced but want a good overview of how the new features in ColdFusion MX may impact on the development process. I also think this class is invaluable to anyone studying for the ColdFusion Developer Exam. The topics covered in ACFD cover most of the exam, and the course materials are without a doubt the best study guide I have seen to date.

More information can be found about ACFD and about registering for ACFD, by visiting Macromedia's training site at www.macromedia.com/go/cfdj_adcf/ or by visiting the Fig Leaf Software ACFD training page at http://training.figleaf.com/figleaftraining/ Courses/Advanced-ColdFusion.cfm.