Rating: 
Summary: Read with caution
Review: I purchased this book in hopes to learn more about dynamic web pages. For the most part, this book is well written and contains many useful illustrations. Chapters are logically broken-down into digestible sections, where one gathers both a valuable hand-on experience and a basic understanding of ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP.I understand no new book is published without errors; and this one is no exception. My only problem is, when I contacted the author (Jeffery) though Allectomedia to point out a few new errors, he never responded. According to the online form you fill-out they state, "We usually respond within a couple days". I waited a month, and didn't receive any response nor notice these new errors added to their errata page. I then filled the online form out again, and another month later, nothing. Perhaps they don't want their errata page to get too large, as it may deter others from purchasing this book. Now I know which books and authors to avoid.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderful!!!
Review: If you use Dreamweaver, & want to know "exactly" what to do to set up a database on your website, and ASP, buy this book!!!
Rating:
Summary: Finest programming start available!
Review: Simply put, this is the best book available to begin your quest into dynamic web sites via Dreamweaver. You won't be disappointed. Easy to understand, easy to follow, and amazingly thorough in its step by step process.
Rating:
Summary: This book ties it all together
Review: The purpose of this book (in my opinion) is to teach you how to use Dreamweaver MX 2004 to create dynamic (database-driven) web sites. It doesn't teach you all there is to know about Dreamweaver, about scripting languages, or about databases. Rather, it shows you how they all tie together. Yes, it will teach you a little about Dreamweaver, because you will be using it for all the lessons. Yes, it will teach you a little about scripting languages, and yes it will teach you a little about databases. You don't need to already know these things to do the exercises or understand the lessons, because the author clearly explains everything you do. However, these topics are covered more completely in more specialized books.
What this book does is show you how you can use Dreamweaver to accomplish a complete database-driven web site. Keeping this in mind, I thought the book was excellent.
The book takes you through the complete process of starting with a simple static site and converting it to a dynamic site (a challenge many web developers face). The first half of the book introduces you to the site and has you converting it from HTML to XHTML. This is a simple task, and Dreamweaver has a function to do that automatically, but the author here shows you exactly what needs to be done and how to do it manually by using search and replace. He then shows how to convert the site to use a simple CSS file. He shows how to use forms, how to pass data between pages, and how to use scripting languages to build a simple calculator.
Okay, you say, that's pretty basic stuff, and I may skip those chapters. That's what I said, but I decided to read every word and do every exercise anyway. I'm glad I did, because there are many gems buried there. Dreamweaver can make even simple tasks more efficient with its built-in capabilities that I didn't know existed even though I've been using Dreamweaver for years. So, skip the first few lessons if you want, but I suggest you do it all.
The last half of the book has you working with database functions and learning how Dreamweaver ties these together with forms and GET/POST value passing. Dreamweaver really has some fantastic capabilities in this area and it seems that you can create complete database-driven pages with just a few clicks of the mouse. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but Dreamweaver does easily generate complex code and puts it into your page for you. The author shows you how to use those capabilities.
Finally, in the last lesson, you generate the pages that update the database by just using the scripting language functions, and not using the Dreamweaver capabilities. Whatever you do, be sure to do this lesson, as it shows you all the work Dreamweaver is doing in the background for you.
Armed with the knowledge from this book, and the books I already have on Dreamweaver, HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL, I feel I can now attack a dynamic site. When I get in trouble, I can refer to the snippets of code in the book to help me get on track.
Rating:
Summary: Awesome book!
Review: This book is great for someone who has been teaching themselves web design. This book helped me go from using out-dated HTML 4.0 code to XHTML in a matter of a few days. A must have book for anyone learning web design.
Rating: 
Summary: Not as good as I expected
Review: This book is not very well written, the author spends a lot of pages to explain things that we don't need to know like: "Replace the text 'Welcome to our site...(20 lines)' by '...' (another 20 lines)"
The author don't go in depth in the subject, you just fly over some methods but after the reading of the book you won't be able to do a lot more than before with ASP, PHP or Coldfusion.
If you love to learn programming languages, don't buy this !
You can trust me !
Rating:
Summary: A Must Have
Review: This is a fantastic book that teaches you how to use Dreamweaver MX 2004 more effectively when coding dynamic database-driven Web sites in one of the 3 programming languages covered (ASP, ColdFusion or PHP). I thoroughly enjoyed Jeffery Bardzell's writing style, allowing me to build on the theories presented, repetition of code and Web standards best practices.
There were a few errors throughout the book, but they were mostly typos. I did not have any trouble with the code presented in each lesson. Also, I was able to complete the entire book without referring to any of the code in the completed files folder. The author also takes the time to clearly list and explain the meaning of each step in technical terms without losing the reader.
If you are new to building dynamic database-driven Web sites, then pick up a copy of this book. I guarantee you will have a better understanding and develop clear coding concepts while working through each lesson. As an added bonus, you will build several useful applications (i.e. search interface, authenticating users, basic content management system, etc.) that you can use as a template for building more complicated applications.
Rating:
Summary: Mac Users - Read this
Review: This review is directed to those who are newcomers to dynamic websites/and or mac users. Get Joe Kissel's book, 50 techniques for the Mac. It shows you how to turn on PHP. Skip the unix stuff written for the mac. Unless you already know unix, it is a huge project to do so.
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