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Rating: 
Summary: Maddening waste of time and money
Review: Do not buy this book. What a ridiculous waste of time and money.
The authors are very knowledgeable about the subject matter, but they demonstrate a fundamental inability and sometimes unwillingness to convey that knowledge to their readers. Only two types of people will find this book of any value: the experienced website programmer and the absolute novice. Anyone in-between will be frustrated by:
a) The super obvious - the amount of obvious information that you can figure out yourself quicker than it takes you to read the instructions in the book and
b) The super obscure - when not discussing the obvious, the authors spend the rest of their time discussing jargon that makes you feel like you're walking into the middle of a conversation between two experts.
If you are already familiar with FrontPage and you are upgrading to 2003, then this might be a good book for you to get up to speed on the new features, though I would warn you that this book is overly verbose. Or, if you are an experienced programmer, but are switching to FrontPage from some other application, then this book might be of value to you. But, if you are a newbie, you're not going to get much out of this.
For us newbies, this book does cover a lot of topics, but none of those topics are explained with sufficient clarity for you to learn anything, other than "gee, I guess I should go out and get a book that explains that topic with some reasonable amount of detail and clarity." The book does not have any shortage of discussion on any topic (it's over 600 pages of small print), but those discussions are incredibly devoid of any point. This book is a showcase of the authors' abilities to say nothing in more words than you can imagine. As I read through each section, I kept thinking to myself "cut to the chase!" You will read lots about what you can do, but you will get very little guidance on how to do it.
On the most important topics, such as cascading style sheets, dynamic web templates and back-end forms management, the authors are almost giddy in pointing out that they couldn't possibly cover those topics in sufficient detail. Instead, they direct you to other books written by them or their associates. The only reason that the authors cannot cover the subject matter in sufficient detail is because of their overly verbose, rambling style of writing. I got so frustrated with this book (and I was very patient, given that I read through over half of it before throwing it down in disgust) that I just went online and starting googling stuff like "cascading style sheets" and "dynamic web templates" and so on. That answered all of my questions in less than an hour. This book was a waste of $35 and a waste of the several hours that I spent struggling through it. I only wish that I had bought it through amazon.com, rather than the local bookstore, so that I could return it.
I think the last straw was when I was reading about back-end forms management and the book stated, "You've read about basic techniques such as posting to an unpublished web page, an e-mail address, or a database early in this chapter..." I did? In this chapter? I had to go back and check again, to see if I missed it. Nope. I didn't miss it. It wasn't there. There is a passing mention that you can do those things, but not explanation of how, which is typical of the entire book. Oh, the hatred!
Again, do not buy this book. But, if you ignore my advice, please be advised that many of the examples given in the book need editing. There were several occasions when I was following a step-by-step procedure and the next step did not correspond to the reality on the screen - "oh, I guess the author assumed that I knew to press `ok' 3 more times and then click on this other option."
The book is a good first draft, but they need to fire their editors, because it should either be 400 pages shorter or totally re-written to include some actual useful information.
Rating:
Summary: Pointless Book - Buy something else if you want to learn FP
Review: I decided to take the publisher up on their invitation to write about the reader's experience. I am writing about the Microsoft Savvy FrontPage 2003 by C. Crumlish. On the surface this appears to be a very promising book. Right from the cover all the way to the table of contents. So what is the problem ? The problem is that Mr. Crumlish spends an awful long time belabouring points that are all too obvious. Four entire chapters are wasted on basically two points: know your audience, organise your material. Ok. I got that in chapter I. I don't need it repeated ad nauseam. Even Mr. Crumlish himself writes at one point: "enough with the advise", let's get down to business. But he never does. The two chapters that I was so looking forward to, Forms and Database connectivity are left barren of any substance. I still don't know how to write to flat files across forms. Say if I have a few pages of questionnaire that the user needs to fill out and then click submit at the very end. How is the material carried over from one from to the next ? No one tells you. Just more advice about knowing your audience and preparing your material. Then I though well I will get to the chapter on database connectivity and surely Mr. Crumlish will show us how to connect a form to a database and update the contents. No such luck. You are shown the most basic and simplistic of wizards of how to connect to a database but beyond that nothing. I don't doubt that a very sincere effort was made to create a "Savvy" book but the end result falls very short of the objective. Mr. Crumlish goes on to profusely thank the web diva for poring over his book to fix errors. Maybe what Mr. Crumlish should have done is asked a plain reader like me to go over the book and then try to build a database-enabled web site. If I am not able to then the book is pointless. And maybe that's what this book is: pointless. I will need to see if the bookshop where I bought it will take it back and allow me to exchange it for a book that does more than offer platitudes.
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