ColdFusion Academic Version: Curriculum Needed

Adobe announced their free academic version of ColdFusion at CFUnited this year that would be available to educational institutions teaching ColdFusion. The release has been plagued by delays, but they promise it is coming soon. During a discussion today on the CF-Talk list about it, the topic of textbooks for teaching ColdFusion came up. I bugged Ben Forta about it and he stated that while they would love to release official teaching materials with it, they haven't received approval for it from the Adobe big cheese yet and he's not holding his breath.

I suggested the community is perfectly capable of pulling something together. As a result, Pete Ruckelshaus created a Google Group ColdFusion-Educators to bump heads on this with. Pete teaches ColdFusion alongside basic HTML, JavaScript, and SQL at his high school. Jordan Michaels who teaches ColdFusion also volunteered to help out.

I figure it would help just to have a simple course outline, a workbook explaining the bases, test questions, and some downloadable code samples. In an ideal world, this would be in some sort of print, but a series of PDF files would certainly be doable. I learned CF in college (on my own) and I am a big fan of getting kid's feet wet as early as possible into CF. With the free academic version of CF, the only other thing holding a school back is course material and someone with some experience to lead the class.

If you have some suggestions, course material of your own, or just want to help out, let us know and Pete will invite you to the group. I won't post his E-mail here in case he doesn't want it floating around, but he is welcome to throw it out.