Adobe ColdFusion Certification and Training
I've been considering a post like this for a while, and for one reason or another I've just never got around to it. However considering the recent Connect meeting given to the Adobe User Group Managers and Community Experts, in addition to Ray Camden's blog posts [1][2], I thought it was time I finally hit submit on the post.
As a Certified Instructor for CF it pains me to teach the official courses. They suck just as much as the whole certification process.
I'll explain why in the next couple of paragraphs. Just to answer a few questions first. Why do the certification? Because I need it to be a Certified Instructor. Why be a Certified Instructor? We (Fuzzy Orange) write our own ColdFusion courses, so when teaching them it's nice to be able to say that although the courses aren't certified by Adobe, I am.
I don't need to repeat what Ray has already said about the certification process, other than it seriously does suck. Unless you're going after Certified Instructor status I tell all clients, developers and any one else who asks NOT to do the exam.
As for the two main official courses; Fast Track to CF and Advanced ColdFusion ... boy, where do I start.
First, if you decide to go after your certification, neither of these courses will actually help you. The courses are lame, only cover certain aspects of CF... in the exam you can get asked on anything. Even the parts the courses cover won't help you. Honestly.
As for the Fast Track course... to accurately describe it, it's an Introduction to Dreamweaver. You really learn sod all about ColdFusion, and any coding you do is done via Dreamweaver's wizards. You come out of the Fast Track in no way better prepared to do any ColdFusion coding.
I'll be honest, when I'm teaching the Fast Track course I tend to ignore most of the official course material. If the course material says you need to click on the Query Wizard tab, and then point and click on database columns you want returned, etc ... I ignore it. I make you type the code in manually.
If you want to know how to use Dreamweaver, go on a Dreamweaver course (though they probably suck too). I want folks to come out of the CF courses to be better prepared to handle CF code that is thrown at them. I want them to be that bit more knowledgeable about CFML and to have a better understanding of exactly what they are doing. Using wizards does NOT do that. Using Dreamweaver typically does not assist with that.
The Advanced course is ... anything but Advanced. It introduces CFC, covers Lists, Arrays and Structs, does a bit more on CFCs, looks at Custom Tags, Web Services and the .NET integration, PDF stuff, <cfimage> and <cffeed> and finishes with a crappy chapter on supposedly scaling applications.
Most of this so called advanced stuff should belong in an introductory class; lists, arrays, structs and CFCs all belong there. They are the bread and butter of any ColdFusion application. These topics are anything but Advanced. The other stuff, is just fluff. I don't mean that it isn't useful material, but I could buy the ColdFusion 8 special edition of the FAQU and save myself a fortune.
Seriously, go buy yourself a subscription to the FAQU, it's so much better value than the official Adobe ColdFusion training
Now, don't get me wrong, a lot of hard work has went into preparing these courses, good or otherwise. I'm in a better position that most to appreciate the amount of work. Aside from teaching courses, I also write them. Fuzzy Orange offer two courses based on ColdFusion Administration and we spend a lot of time re-evaluating these after every course and every bit of feedback. However, the official ColdFusion courses really haven't changed since version 6. It's obviously Adobe aren't listening to feedback. From anyone. Which leads onto ...
... In regards the official Adobe certification process, and not just for ColdFusion, it's obvious Adobe really don't give a damn. They've pretty much stated it in the Connect presentation. It's got to the stage whereby I'm wondering if being a Certified Instructor is worse all the hassle. When your Instructors are questioning the entire process, c'mon Adobe, you really need to take notice!
I could also go to town on the whole Adobe Partner set up; Solution Partner, Training, etc, but that's for another blog post. Actually, I could write a book about how bad the entire Partner program is. And I'm not alone in this opinion.
Back to the point at hand though; certification.
The ColdFusion certification is NOT worth it. It won't make you a better developer, the vast majority of people in the know will not put you before another candidate just because you have it. If you absolutely have to do it, then you have my sympathy. If you happen to fail the exam, or don't get the Advanced status, simply shrug it off. By no means does passing the ColdFusion exam accurately qualify your skills as a ColdFusion developer.
As for the advanced course - I could possible see holding CFCs till then, but arrays and lists are advanced? Who in their right mind made that call?
On the subject of the exam, as you already know, certified instructors are obliged to take the exam. However, I like many others do not like to go into the exam unprepared. So, I recently asked Ben Forta whether he would be repeating the very useful ColdFusion Developer Study Guide, since that is a good indication and reference point for exam topics. Alas, Ben has not been approached by the publishers (PeachPit via Adobe Press), so that is unlikely to be created.
I'm sure many of you, assuming the exam was worthwhile, would not go into it without studying, afterall you would not 'blag' it in a national exam, so why a professional. Adobe's heart just isn't in it. They should take a leaf out of Sun and Microsoft's training manual.
In my opinion, creating quality training material followed by a worthwhile examination is not only key to endorsing a product but also gives the product credibility. Ray Camden, in his blog posts, mentioned that the creation of such courses costs about $50k whilst each change is $2.5k; that is peanuts for an organisation like Adobe. If they'd said the exam costs $1m I would understand, but a mere $50k for a multi-billion-dollar company, that beggars belief!
Adobe are taking their eye off the ball and it smacks of New Labour, i.e. using stealth to eventually remove an unwanted yoke around their necks. A little effort and dare I say it, 'joined up thinking' at Adobe can make ColdFusion shine. Let's see that happening please.
Then there's Chapter 9, which is supposed to teach UDFs, Custom Tags, and CFCs, but only ever demos each one - it never has students actually write a function or custom tag. And the custom tag that they use is one that Ben Forta wrote in 1997! Come on!
Chapter 10 is even worse - supposedly a unit on application security, it only covers the DW ColdFusion Login Wizard, which is an entirely useless "feature" of DW to begin with.
And I disagree entirely with Ray on leaving CFCs for the advanced course. I don't think that anyone can honestly call themselves a CF developer if they don't know CFCs. There is so much "fluff" in the book that can be taken out to make room for a real unit on the use of CFCs. You guys, in the new edition of CFWACK, cover CFCs from the very beginning - you do it before you introduce queries since it makes no sense today to have queries that aren't in CFCs - so why shouldn't the official book follow the same logic?
I've also written long and detailed complaints to the folks in charge of these products and gotten no response. What's sad here is that I also agree that Adobe obviously doesn't care about certification and about official courseware anymore. So then the obvious question becomes, why do they even have it?
One last thing - do you sell the courseware you write? I would love to find an alternative to the official books. If so, could you please email me directly at rob(at)filmstosee(dot)com and let me know how to order?
And, you could download the actual software to practice with.
Adobe needs to stop messing around with the "official" testing venues and just put the stuff online. Teach us exactly what you want us to know about your products, spend a little cash sending out a certificate, and recognize a marketing tool for what it is.
I was just wondering... do you still have to use the old materials? In all the classes I teach, we don't have to use any Adobe materials. Not that I've found good materials to use to teach the other classes with. The classroom in a book's stank for CS3. All of them. I did the Snoopy happy dance when I didn't have to use the old MM books for Dreamweaver and Flash. Hated them. They only had 1 redeeming feature in my mind.
So there isn't anything else better out there?
But, what would put in a beginner or advanced CF course? I would expect, from a business perspective, that they are designed to lead on each other. Someone sat down created a list of things worth teaching and then split it up into a cohesive plan. "Fast Track" and "Advanced" are just marketing monikers put on after the fact.
A few answers I would expect to receive are Design Patterns and/or Frameworks; so I'll address those.
Should Adobe curriculum teach Design Patterns? No! Design patterns are not ColdFusion specific. People go to the course to learn how to be productive in ColdFusion. There are other avenues to learn about programming concepts.
Should an Adobe curriculum teach community frameworks? I think not. There are too many frameworks for Adobe to teach all of them. Choosing one over another would give the impression that Adobe is giving precedence to one "approach" over the other. It is in Adobe's best long term strategy to keep CF as flexible as possible. Even if the language is flexible, teaching a framework will give the impression that "Adobe says develop like this." I believe leaving that impression may have a long-term negative impact.
Just my thoughts of the moment. ;)