The aim of this tutorial is to explain to someone that never worked with ColdFusion as to what it is and how to get started quickly. There is no assumed prior knowledge of ColdFusion. However, it is assumed that you have already installed a CF (CF stands for ColdFusion) server. In the database section I also assumed that you installed a database server - for my examples I will use a SQL server and its default databases (pubs and Northwind). I assume that you know, or someone will help you with installing datasource names for these two databases.
ColdFusion is a scripting language, that since 1996 has been used by developers to create dynamic websites. A dynamic website can change depending on outside factors like data, user preferences or changes in backend database. Websites that only use HTML are static. HTML is a set of tags used to format and link pieces of text - it doesn't change. DHTML (dynamic HTML) based website has limited ability to interact with the website visitor, however, its inability to access a database make it almost static.
ColdFusion is a programming language that is tag based and can be used on the same page as HTML (however for more advanced programming projects such practice is discouraged). All ColdFusion tags start with "cf", for example, <cfset yourName = "Joe"> this tag sets variable "yourName" to the value of "Joe". ColdFusion is not concerned with variable and statement case, thus <CFSET YOURname = "Joe"> is the same as <CFset yourNamE = "Joe">.
