Of all the tags in ColdFusion, CFDUMP has to be one of the handiest tags. Any ColdFusion developer who uses the tag has probably at some point wanted to use it in other languages.

The ColdFusion Developers Journal has an article called: CF Six Pack by Greg Cerveny which lists 6 tags new developers should be using.

I pretty much agree with all the tags on the list, except for cfsetting, I think if your a newbie, just enable whitespace suppression in the CF admin.