Rating: 
Summary: Useful to the resourceful Mac owner
Review: Well, I've used this book to learn how to use this new Dreamweaver MX/PHP combination using my various Apple computers with great success.Sure it's not geared towards Mac users, but I would have felt not a little cheated, had I discovered nothing but page after page about how to download and install PHP or MySQL on Macs. You can find all that stuff on-line - especially at Mark Liyanage's excellent Entropy website! It's true that there is too much included on how to install these packages on PCs - but we all know PC users are a little shy of their wits, and they probably need all the help they can get, the poor dears! What this book does do, is get you running good and fast, creating an example website. I've done some web design before, but haven't made it very far. I always find myself in an awful dither about how to structure a database for a website. I found the book's example very helpful in this respect. It was a realistic project (a hotel booking system) and you are shown how easy Dreamweaver makes it to read and write stuff on a database like this. I actually used the same approach as the book's example, for a website I built for a local conference centre. I must say that the only thing I wish is that these authors would write me a follow on title, to extend on what I've now learnt. The book is great for learning, but is not really geared towards people in the situation where I now find myself - uploading stuff from my Mac onto my ISPs Cobalt Linux servers, for instance! In a way, it teases you, because it takes you this far and then says "there you go, you're on your own, now!" Four stars, I think, authors! A nice book, of a nice size, but give me a follow on title, so as I can make it to the stars!
Rating: 
Summary: Not for beginners or intermediate
Review: While the content of the book is potentially good, anybody who needs a little handholding might get lost quickly as the author does not give much background information and skips many steps that are second nature to proficient developers. This is where the beginner puts this book away and the intermediate user struggles with finding more information on how-to-do a particular thing. (This starts with the setup of a Apache / MySQL / PHP server and ripples thru the whole book.) In addition to the content, the book is slightly disorganized and not the easiest reading material. Not so much because of difficulty but because of writing style.
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