Rating:  Summary: A thorough grounding Review: This book is a meaty tome and worthy of a place on any developers desk. It explores every aspect of Dreamweaver MX - no stone is left unturned. The Authors not only have a great understanding of the software but also of the nature of the web and the requirements necessary to build better websites. It is with this understanding that they take the reader through each chapter, explaining what to do and how to do it. As an experienced developer myself, I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of information I gleaned from this book. The writing style is accessible and even though there's a lot of it, it never really feels cumbersome. You feel like you're learning at the turn of each page. If I had to pick one thing over everything else that I liked about this book it would be the short interviews with 'real world' people embedded into the chapters. The idea here is to conduct an interview with a developer who actively uses the procedures or elements being discussed in that chapter and to see how Dreamweaver MX helps them to achieve their goals in that respect. Thorough and informative. A well deserved 5 out of 5 stars.
Rating:  Summary: Covers everything you need to start using MX. Review: This is a big book, 1200 pages. It covers everything offered by MX as well as explaining good programming practices. It does this very well. However, I do not consider this a book for experienced users. MX includes so many features that it takes a book this size to just mention them all. Also, the good programming practices takes up almost as much space as the parts on how to use MX. If you are new to MX and to programming this book will give you an excellent start both in using MX and how to develop web projects in an intelligent manner.
Rating:  Summary: Comprehensive Review: This is a very comprehensive book. What impressed me first was the flow of content. It is very well organized and logical. It begins with what's new and moves into the nuts and bolts of using Dreamweaver, such as the workspace, tools and basic things such as text images and so on.This book goes far beyond just using Dreamweaver as a layout tool but it covers a lot of development features such as a chapter on Web Pages with Flash and basic coverage of using ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, PHP, and JSP. The authors cover things such as multimedia issues, what they are, when to use multimedia and how to incorporate it into your Dreamweaver layout. This chapter also pointed out valid reasons for using multimedia such as education, to direct attention to illustrate and many more reasons. Where the bulk of the book concentrates on using the visual tools of Dreamweaver the last portion works with the code. It covers markup languages, writing code and extensions. This book is through and well rounded. I'd highly recommend this book to all user levels.
Rating:  Summary: ONE tech book that's a pleasure to read! Review: This is my introduction to Dreamweaver and web design, so I am not one to comment on the technical aspects (that is, whether the book has the best technical advice). However, I have read and written enough, and have read quite a few pieces of technical writing (I have 2 other books on Dreamweaver), to know that in terms of quality of writing, this is a winner. The book is actually a pleasure to read! (I wonder if that has to do with the fact that 2 of the authors are women!?) I have finished the first part already and everything is organized logically and explained very clearly--unlike many of the tech stuff out there (including some in the Dummies series) which often leave you scratching your head. (I do notice some minor typos here and there--too bad because the writing is superb.)
Rating:  Summary: great dreamweaver overview for beginners Review: This is one seriously thick book, and takes ome time to work your way through, so offers pretty good value for money. The problems with trying to write an extensive overview book along the lines of this or dreamweaver bible, is that as each version expands the capabilities of the product, the book becomes thicker while at the same time having less space available to deal with each area, i can see that this seems to have created a problem with this release as there are huge ammounts of functionality that have been added, especially in the area of dynamic data driven web-site design. This book works well as an overview of the product, and for a beginner to dreamweaver would prove a very good overview and reference. The material to be gleaned would be similiar to that gained from a two or three day introductory training course. The introductory material is well dealt with and clearly explained, the authors are definately at their most comfortable with this traditional style web design using dreamweaver, and this is the books strongest area. Personally i wouldnt see too much material here which would be of interest to an intermediate or advanced dreamweaver user, the new features are dealt with fairly quickly at the front of the book, and beyond that there is a quick overview of the new data driven dreamweaver using the various technoligies, but useful only as an introduction to these technologies. For the designer the book much like all big overview books of this type offers nothing new, the design examples are very basic, and there is nothing new or challenging, the book is more software centric than design centric, most useful as a reference for the various dialogue boxes and settings, but certainly not inspirational in design terms. The book design itself is somewhat flawed, nice cover, but the interior layout is poorly designed, in a book of this size somewhat understandable as there is such a high volume of content. The various interviews with designers, are superflous, and run in with the body copy to the degree of annoyance, again more a layout flaw, but these interviews are of limited use. I would also question the long delay before introducing the site management tools, in fact first introduced in depth at page 700, these in my opinion should have been integrated earlier. The newest and most exciting side of dreamweaver the data driven side associated with ultradev previously is seriously under represented here, and a very basic overview of the various technologies and a very simple example site is all we get. This section also lacks the flow and confidence of earlier sections. in summary, the book offeres a good tour through the software, and it is a very good learning guide for the beginner to dreamweaver, for the advanced user there is some useful reference material but lacks serious depth in the new areas.
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