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Summary: Review: Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual
Review: The Dreamweaver MX 2004 book is, as its series title says, the "missing manual." The Missing Manual series is a highly respected and popular technological series, edited and managed by David Pogue, and published by Pogue Press in cooperation with O'Reilly & Associates, Incorporated. This book was written by David Sawyer McFarland.The Dreamweaver MX 2004 book is targeted at beginners--or people with just a little experience--and even web design experts. "The Missing Manual" series of books has never failed to be good, even great, so I was looking forward to reviewing this book. Out of the starting gate, organization is a key factor in the book's layout. A clear, easy-to-follow table of contents provides a quick reference to parts of the book the reader may or may not want to jump right into or skip completely, depending, of course, on the reader's experience level. This table of contents is followed by a short introduction chapter which tells what's new in Dreamweaver, describes differences, or parallels, between HTML and XHTML, and explains a little bit about cascading style sheets (CSS). Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual continues this great organization by separating the book into six distinct sections: Part 1, Building a Web Page; Part 2, Building a Better Web Page; Part 3, Bringing Your Pages to Life; Part 4, Building a Web Site; Part 5, Dreamweaver Power, and finally, Part 6, Dynamic Dreamweaver. The progression from Part 1 to Part 4 is a great help to beginners, and the final two parts provide much assistance to beginners moving into the expert zone of webmastering. What I found to be the best feature of the book was the supplemental material and resources offered by the author. They are available at the author's website in the form of downloadable files, tutorials, and several links to other websites for even more help and answers. However, the feature that is perhaps the most useful is the capability to link to a working example of the web pages you are supposed to build and actually see a live model in action as comparison. The fonts used, Formata and Minion, and the layout of Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual were very easy to read and follow--easy on the eyes, at least to mine. There is one thing, though. In future editions, I would like to see spiral binding so that the book could lay open when using it at the computer, especially when referring back and forth from the book to my computer screen. I had to apply different methods of holding the book open, i.e., cordless phones, clipping heavy pens to the pages, etc., and this was just inconvenient. Bottom line: Does the book live up to its title? Yes. Do I recommend Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual? Yes.
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Summary: Dreamweaver MX 2004 Manual Is Found Here
Review: The slogan of the Missing Manual series is "The book that should have been in the box" and Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual lives up to the series' reputation. Macromedia wouldn't want to ship this book with the software because it's a doorstop at 800 pages. Imagine what it would do to the packaging and the pricing of the already expensive software. One itsy bitsy negative, but this book is not the only one avoiding it. Dreamweaver's help file doesn't cover it and neither does the forum on Macromedia's Web site. There is a feature called download stats listing the size of the file and the time it would take to download it. At what speed? 56k? T1? What? I would assume 56k, but assumptions are not reliable. At 800 pages, you can expect all the features to be covered through step-by-step instructions, notes, and screen shots. The hard core stuff like building dynamic Web pages, working with databases, and using server programming within Dreamweaver are all there for those ready for a challenge. McFarland goes the extra mile to note differences between computer systems (Mac vs. PCs) and browsers (compatibility). Looking at the table of contents is proof of the book's completeness and all I need to do is attest to its readability. First timers to creating a Web site or to Dreamweaver as well as owners of earlier versions will gain plenty of knowledge from this one.
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Summary: EXCELLENT INTRO FOR BEGINNERS
Review: This is the second book I buy from the "Missing Manual" series (the first one being "Mac OSX: The Missing Manual"), and I keep buying them for a good reason: They're written in such a way that they make even hard or boring concepts easy to understand.
Armed with this book you will be able to start building web pages and entire sites with pictures, links, interactive forms, CSS, JavaScript Behaviors and, most important, clean HTML and XHTML.
The only thing to keep in mind is that in order to work through the tutorials you need an Internet connection. However, once you're online downloading the files is REALLY easy and the files are so small that you can store in floppy disks! (if you want to).
If you want to enjoy learning Dreamweaver MX'04, get this book.
Rating:
Summary: Great
Review: You can't ask for more out of a software manual than this book gives. Easy to follow, as a reference or a start-to-finish guide, and amusing at times. I would highly recommend this book for any novice or experienced Dreamweaver user.
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