Rating: 
Summary: Sketchy overview
Review: This book has many shortcomings but I liked it anyway. You'll be exposed to situations that force you to create objects such as graphics, animations and forms. This is both a blessing and a curse. For example the author said go online and locate a graphic to demonstrate an animated .gif! So I went on CNET and located and downloaded an American flag furling in the wind. Kind of tacky if you ask me. There were no real projects, something I believe the book desperately needed, but some of the techniques the author had me develop were a fair substitute. I liked being forced to think. It forced me to learn how to use the product. Also, the extensive use of screen captures sometimes made up for the terse instructions. This is a real advantage. For example, I went through the Dreamweaver 4 Hands On Training book; that book didn't require much thinking, just following the instructions, so I didn't feel as involved and didn't feel as if I'd learned as much. One omission that the author repeated was to gloss over the Export Preview Image Optimizer; its a moderately complex dialog box and I wish he would've explained how to use it. Instead he just said "When you are happy with the settings click the Export button to continue." He left optimization for the last eleven pages of the book. He occasionally fails to mention little things that you have to do to get his techniques to work. I sorely needed a sample file on Part 21 Task 3; the author called for a map of a country to render as a imagemap. I spent hours on CNET.COM to no avail. I found lots of maps, but none to download for free. This is one of many circumstances where he should've supplied graphics. After all, how can you teach how to use a graphics program without any graphics? Also, in two places the author referred to commands in Fireworks that didn't exist. In the second, Copy HTML Code, he claimed "a wizard opens that will guide you through exporting the image files to a specified location and copying the HTML code into the Clipboard." Sorry, no such luck in my version folks.Overall, you'll learn more in the Fireworks portion of the book than you will in the Dreamweaver portion. Finally, I must say that I was glad to finish this book and I mean that in a positive sense. I don't find it easy to go through a book when I have to both read and follow directions. When I'm just mindlessly following directions or blandly reading text, I can go through a large book but I don't learn much. But when you have to follow exercises and think and find assets and learn, a 350 page book is pretty big. Nevertheless, I have ordered the Macromedia Dreamweaver & Fireworks Workshop. It covers material this book doesn't cover. Overall I give this book 2.5 stars; it covers both Dreamweaver and Fireworks superficially. The lack of projects and assets detracts from its value. The author is a good writer and knows how to create projects. I suspect the editor's restrictions made the book worse than the author could've written it.
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