Is Coldfusion Express worth using?

I bought a book on Coldfusion a few weeks ago. Based on what I've read thusfar, it sounds like a really cool language (ie. powerful, yet very simple to develop in)!! I'd really like to try it out on my site, but unless I know it's worth it, I don't see the point in spending $$ to pay for the server program. While searching on Amazon.com, I found out that there was a free program called Coldfusion Express. Since it's free, I know it's not as powerful as Coldfusion MX, but is it worth using? What features are missing? I mean, could I use it to develop pages on my local Windows XP/Apache-based intranet site and upload them to a leased server? Thanks!

No.

CF Express is based on CF 4.5 I believe, which is REALLY old. If you want to learn, download the fully-functional CFMX developers edition. If you want to use CF, there are plenty of HUGE advantages over every other platform that allow it to practically sell itself.

Yah, found out about the developers edition after posting this message. Still trying to figure out how to get it to work. So what are the HUGE advantages to using it instead of PHP, ASP, or JSP?

The biggest single advantages are speed and simplicity. Virtually any task that you can think of (querying a database, invoking a web service, manipulating XML, doing XSLT or XPath queries, etc) is so much easier in CF that it will make your head swim. Things that take dozens or hundreds of lines of code in PHP, ASP or JSP often take just a few lines of CFML.