Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Unleashed

Rating:
Summary: Very Disappointed
Review: I am an intermediate level website developer. I thought this would be an great book. When I received it the first thing I did was turn to the chapter on embedding Flash videos. I quickly discovered that 9 out of 10 figures/screenpics in the chapter were for the wrong topic! It is the most error filled book I have ever bought. Even the website listed as the books "support" site is for a different company! I have bought hundreds of books over the last decade. This is the first one I have ever returned because it was so poorly proofread. Also, the publisher has no "errata" site, and did not return my email asking for help. Matt

Rating:
Summary: 1008 pages of comprehensive & "user friendly" information
Review: The collaborative work of Dreamweaver experts Zak Ruvalcaba and Matthew Pizzi, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Unleashed is clearly the most complete guide to cover Dreamweaver MX 2004's powerful features shows readers strategies for designing, managing and developing sophisticated websites within the Dreamweaver environment. Featuring 1008 pages of comprehensive, definitive, superbly organized, and "user friendly" accessible information, Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Unleashed is indispensable for anyone seeking to utlize what Macromedia Dreamwevar MX 2004 has to offer them both personally and professionally.



Rating:
Summary: If you're Designer/Programmer this is the book for you
Review: This book is the perfect choice if you're a designer that also creates or wants to create data-driven websites. I create some of my asp code in Visual Studio. Unfortunately, Visual Studio doesn't work near as well as Dreamweaver for layout and most basic tasks. I much prefer to do layout and basic data-connected web controls in Dreamweaver if I can help it. Also, I prefer to use Dreamweaver templates. Because of Dreamweaver's tight integration with Flash and Fireworks, it will probably always be my main application. Also, as a designer, I like the clean design that is used in the examples in this book. I already own a couple of books by Zak Ruvalcaba (I own the previous version of this book). I believe that Zak is much better at explaining asp.net programming than any of the other authors that specialize teaching programming to designers.

Rating:
Summary: Full of errors -- companion website doesn't work!
Review: This book turned out to be a big disappointment. For one, I found too many errors. There are numerous misspellings and incorrect information. For instance, part of the book defines a JPEG as a "glossy compression format". If I hadn't read numerous other books about JPEG files, I might not have noticed this. The author should have defined a JPEG as a "lossy" format.. not "glossy". I can handle a few errors and misspellings. However, the biggest issue I have with this book is the "companion" website. As many readers of training or technical books know, companion websites are important when learning. This book requests that the reader download samples files from it's companion website. Unfortunately, the website is defunct. This is a fairly new book and should be more current than it is. This book had potential, but just didn't meet my basic accuracy requirements. This book turned out to be more frustration than it's worth.

Rating:
Summary: Competing with web containers
Review: This is one of the major web page authoring tools out there in the marketplace. Broadly, the book divides into two parts. One is the purview of earlier authoring packages, including previous versions of Dreamweaver. Namely, the building of HTML pages, of course. Plus the use of CSS to easily enforce a common style across a set of pages. The power of Dreamweaver can be seen in how it manages to hide almost all of the HTML tags from you. No grungy scrabbling around with these. Instead, it gives an extensive GUI that lets you easily construct complex pages.

But the second part of the book is also interesting. It focuses on the setting up and running of a web server. And hooking it to various databases like MySQL. If you have a Microsoft machine, the book takes you on an extensive tour of combining ASPs and Dreamweaver to fashion dynamic pages. Including the enabling of simple e-commerce, using shopping carts. Plus there is even a section on using Web Services.

You can see how Dreamweaver has moved into the space of competing with web containers like Tomcat, JBoss and WebSphere. Though it lacks the extensive abilities of those. Of course, by the same token, they don't have much (anything?) in the way of building visually appealing pages.