Rating: 
Summary: Buy This Book - It's the only one you'll need
Review: As an experienced technical writer, this is the first book I've read that is written in the form of a step-by-step procedure. This book is a great help to learning an upgraded version of Dreamweaver. Other authors should take note of its format. Kudos!
Rating:
Summary: It ain't "intuitive"
Review: Before reading further, one should note that this may be as much a review of Dreamweaver as David McFarland's book.
Dreamweaver MX 2004 is probably the most popular program for web-site creation. With Dreamweaver one can create complex web-sites more easily than if one were writing in hypertext markup language (HTML). (My son who does this for a living says he can create sites just as quickly by writing HTML directly, but his old man certainly can't.) But this is not a simple program to use. The slim green volume that accompanies the software merely scratches the surface and it is unlikely that anyone could put together anything more than the most rudimentary site with only the instructions that come in the manual.
Instead one needs a book like "Dreamweaver 2004: the Missing Manual" to begin to tap the potential of the program. This book is part of a series by Pogue Press aimed at supplementing software vendors' instructions. McFarland, using straight forward simple language, takes you through the steps to basic competency with the program, using several tutorials that one can download from the publisher's own website.
But don't think this will be a simple task. If you are not familiar with HTML you will have to get at least 200 pages into this volume of more than 800 pages to comfortably create a site. But you shouldn't stop there. Even if you skip to only the most essential chapters, you'll want to go back and consider how to integrate your website with programs like Flash and Shockwave. And if you expect to spend any time building or developing websites you'll also want to learn how to use the Dreamweaver power tools like snippets and templates. Advanced users can even learn how to create dynamic web sites tied to databases. The author covers it all. Unfortunately the software is powerful but not very intuitive. As a result, as I used the program to revise my own website, I found myself frequently looking in the book's index to find help. Most of the time I found it easily.
And the dirtiest secret of all is that eventually, if you want to build complex websites, you are going to have to learn some HTML. Oh, not a lot of tags, but at least the structure of the language, so you can go into the code and make changes. I found myself occasionally lousing up a page so badly that I couldn't figure out how to use the Dreamweaver design tools and had to go into the program's code view to straighten things out. Of course, this wasn't the author's fault - he gave me everything he could, but it's a complex program. Still I don't see how anyone who's serious about building a website would want to be without Dreamweaver, and how anyone who's not an experienced programmer (and perhaps even some who are) would want to be without this book.
Rating:
Summary: Hands Down The Best!
Review: Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual is hands-down the best tutorial and reference available on this complex, deep program. Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual was already an excellent book, but Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual improves upon it in almost every way.McFarland has almost doubled the amount of content in this book while maintaining his clear, accessible style. The presentation is clear and easy to read, but there is great depth here (the tips on database integration alone are worth the price of admission). It's one of the few computer books I've seen that I'd feel comfortable recommending to absolute beginners as well as seasoned experts. Great job, and well worthy of the O'Reilly mark.
Rating: 
Summary: Great overall
Review: I am a beginner at dreamweaver and to start off, I bought 2 dreamweaver books; this one and the visual quickstart guide to dreamweaver. This book has been a pleasure to read and I reach for this book first whenever I encounter a problem. I have not had a real chance to compare this book with other dreamweaver books but I'll tell you this: Dreamweaver MX, the missing manual will not let you down
Rating:
Summary: as good as it gets for the developer
Review: I am a developer that is usually annoyed by those visual books that assume that the reader will get a heart attack at the first sight of the code. This book was good to present most of the concepts in developer-friendly manner. And even if you skip a chapter on animation (because it's for "creative" types) or on databases (because it's "for dummies") you are still left with a solid book on how to develop, maintain, and administer your site using a developer-friendly environment.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding!
Review: I purchased Dreamweaver MX a couple of weeks ago and needed a book to fill in the 'blanks' that the manual doesn't cover or explain to the depth that I wanted. This book is a perfect addition to learning the features of this application. The fact that this book is published by O'Reilly was an added bonus. Great job by David McFarland!
Rating:
Summary: mik
Review: I think that Dremweaver MX is most popular and very goot program for web design.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written, Comprehensive, Simply the Best
Review: I've had a bit of experience with Dreamweaver, but this book rounded out my education. It contains all the information I needed (and more), has clear & well-written text, and an excellent structure that allowed me to access the information very quickly (they even made the binding in such a way that the pages lie flat). Not only is book accessible, but it continues to be a valuable resource on my bookshelf. As others have mentioned, one of the great things about this book is the fact that it also talks about Dreamweaver's limitations; options (such as frames) that could lead to problems later on. By the time I've gone through computer manuals, I usually riddle them with post-its in an effort to organize the information; this book is so well thought-out that so far I haven't needed to. Earlier I'd bought the Visual Quickstart Guide's Dreamweaver MX manual (filled with post-it tabs in response to poor organization and because the information was so difficult to extract), but ever since I bought the McFarland book, the Quickstart Guide been collecting dust.
Rating:
Summary: Well-written, Comprehensive, Simply the Best
Review: I've had a bit of experience with Dreamweaver, but this book rounded out my education. It contains all the information I needed (and more), has clear & well-written text, and an excellent structure that allowed me to access the information very quickly (they even made the binding in such a way that the pages lie flat). Not only is book accessible, but it continues to be a valuable resource on my bookshelf. As others have mentioned, one of the great things about this book is the fact that it also talks about Dreamweaver's limitations; options (such as frames) that could lead to problems later on. By the time I've gone through computer manuals, I usually riddle them with post-its in an effort to organize the information; this book is so well thought-out that so far I haven't needed to. Earlier I'd bought the Visual Quickstart Guide's Dreamweaver MX manual (filled with post-it tabs in response to poor organization and because the information was so difficult to extract), but ever since I bought the McFarland book, the Quickstart Guide been collecting dust.
Rating: 
Summary: This book does the best it can with a bug ridden product
Review: If you have to use Dreamweaver MX, this book will help you.
Dreamweaver MX itself is a buggy mess that will create more work for developers who use it than it saves. None of its highly touted features such as browser compatability checking, WYSIWIG, and publishing work very well. Not to mention all the hangs/crashes. PHP and Database support got done just enough to trick people into trying it, then you are stuck unless you toss your site out and start over.
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