You'll love ColdFusion. In my opinion, it has some major benefits over ASP. First off, ColdFusion is much more simplified. Its tags are similar to html tags, and it is
very easy to learn. There are very few things that it can't do and it is very powerful. You can deploy most applications a lot quicker in ColdFusion versus ASP and the latest version of CF (6.1) had some major improvements over the previous model. It is much faster.
For instance, to perform a query, ColdFusion has made it very simple. Here's an example:
<cfquery name="getContacts" datasource="mydatasource">
SELECT ID,Name,Email
FROM tbl_Contacts
ORDER BY Name
</cfquery>
<cfoutput query="getContacts">
#Name#<br>
<a href="mailto:#Email#">#Email#</a>
</cfoutput>
The <cfoutput> acts as your "Loop". There is typically less programming time required in ColdFusion. The same query in ASP would require at least twice the amount of lines/commands to perform the operation. There's no need to "Dim" your connection string or SQL command, etc. ColdFusion uses a datasource and it's connection string is stored in ColdFusion Administrator.
I develop in both ColdFusion and ASP.NET. For the most part, I prefer ColdFusion, as I can develop a site usually quicker in ColdFusion. ASP.NET has some advantages over ColdFusion, but like said before, I haven't come across anything that ColdFusion couldn't do for me, (personally). Some people call ColdFusion a non-programmer's language, but I just think they don't realize it's power.
The first book I bought was titled "Macromedia ColdFusion MX Web Application Constructio Kit, 5th Edition" by Ben Forta and Nate Weiss, which was an excellent resource.
An excellent site for resources and GREAT tutorials is
http://www.easycfm.com/
They have a bunch of examples/tutorials that you can easily copy and paste.
Well, I think I've babbled enough for now. Be sure to check out EasyCFM.com, it's a great resource.
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