Web Books

Joseph Lowery has a love affaire with Dreamweaver dating back to 1998 and version 1.0; that's why this book is more than just an expert writing about a piece of software, Joseph is passionate about Dreamweaver and the result is a real work of love. The book contains 10 chapters, covering different topics; each chapter stands on its own, allowing the reader to pick only one topic at time, there is no need to read from cover to cover here. The vast majority of the material available here is simply not available elsewhere; Mr Lowery covered things that may surprise even a seasoned Dreamweaver veteran like me. If you enjoy pushing Dreamweaver to its limits you can't miss this one

Beyond Dreamweaver covers one of my favorite things about Dreamweaver, which is its open-endedness. Web design is all about pushing limits -- of our own knowledge, of HTML, of browsers -- and Dreamweaver gives its users lots of room to push. So you want to adapt Dreamweaver to work with your company's Content Management System? This book shows you how. You want to work with the latest, greatest XML-based language out there, even though Dreamweaver doesn't *officially* support it? Dreamweaver can support just about anything you throw at it, and this book shows you how. And each chapter is written from a problem-solving, why-would-I-want-to-do-this perspective that makes it quickly useful.

This book will show you what you didn't even know you need to know. I am a medium to advanced Dreamweaver user and I learned so much from this book, starting in the first chapter. I think this book is perfect for people who have used the software for a while, but don't really push it to its limits. Mr. Lowery shows you important things in two general categories: how to accomplish things you couldn't before and how to streamline your workflow to be more efficient.

With an abundance of books on the market focusing on the techniques built into Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX product, reading this book was a breath of fresh air as it takes the product, and completely blows it apart.

The techniques in this book, such as integrating DMX into your content management solution, extending the product using C++ as well as dealing with cutting issues such as accessibility will make you more productive and your workflow more refined.

Lowery leaves no stone unturned, showing clearly how to integrate through the extensibility layer with Fireworks; and explains how to link data into Flash in a concise, easy to understand way.

The techniques discussed are also fully extendable to your own ideas so the book will lay down a very important framework.

A fantastic tome which should hold pride of place on your desktop.

If you have been working with Dreamweaver for some time now, and are ready to take your skills to the next level, Beyond Dreamweaver is the perfect resource. Through a concise and straightforward writing style, the author takes you on a broad exploration of development possibilities beyond Dreamweaver's "everyday" usage.

The book begins with an excellent chapter on the ease of integrating Dreamweaver MX with Content Management Systems. While this chapter may not seem as relevant to developers since Macromedia's introduction of their content management system - Contribute, it clearly demonstrates the extensibility of Dreamweaver. In doing so, it opens the reader's mind to virtually unlimited possibilities for creating custom integrations. Additionally, it continues to be a valuable example for developers using other Content Management Systems such as Interwoven or BlueMartini.

The next chapter provides an excellent overview of Section 508 website accessibility requirements. It also discusses new features available in Dreamweaver MX that will assist developers in ensuring that their websites are accessible.

Beyond Dreamweaver goes on to provide a great introduction to XML. Examples clearly demonstrate how to use Dreamweaver MX, both to export template content to XML and import XML into Dreamweaver templates.

The next few chapters present a variety of techniques that will enhance productivity. You will learn how to build Sequential Navigational Systems for both small and large scale websites; about Dreamweaver's ability to cross-integrate with other Macromedia products such as Fireworks and Flash; and how to go beyond Dreamweaver's built in capabilities and actually build your own custom cross-product extensions.

If you are interested in creating your own extensions, Beyond Dreamweaver explains how to use the standard classes and libraries that ship with Dreamweaver as a starting point. And if you really want to dig in and explore under the hood, it gives you an excellent example of how to take this even further by using C++ to create your own extensions to JavaScript.

The chapter "Making Flash Connections" was of particular interest to me as a designer/developer who specializes in Flash site development and dynamically generated database driven websites. A valuable example that was provided demonstrates the ability to pass data - either static or dynamically generated - from a Dreamweaver coded page to a Flash .swf file. Additionally, a second example demonstrates the new Flash Remoting features which allows Flash to send and receive more complete data structures. I particularly enjoyed exploring the possibilities of combining the Macromedia tri-product MX powerhouse - Flash, Dreamweaver and ColdFusion. Quite a combo!

Beyond Dreamweaver does not extensively delve into any one topic. Instead it provides the reader with a broad range of examples that can be used as a springboard for further exploration.

The book was written by Tim Ash of SiteTuners.com, a web analytics and site optimization service who does landing page optimization among other things for his living.

It is a real-world and practical guide to landing page testing and optimization without any fluff. It is really for the folks who do the testing and the ones who have to sell it to their boss and need to know about the details of the process of landing page testing, what is involved, what are the risks and how it should be approached and why.

It is very useful and complimentary to the "Landing Page Handbook" by MarketingSherpa, the $500 "bible" for folks who do serious landing page optimization for their business.

They also overlap in a few areas. This means that it is also a good buy for people who are not doing enough business that involves using landing pages to justify and recoup the $500 investment in the MarketingSherpa book. It's not exactly an alternative, but it is a start that cost a lot less.

If you are doing serious business with landing pages, I recommend getting both books. The return (increase in conversion = increase in business and profits) you will get out from it will pay for the initial investment quickly and then over and over again for the time to come.

Though I had given this book 5 stars, I really mean it - this book is everything you need about the topic.
But.
A warning here. Author goes on for a lot of math, theory and things, what can scare you away, in case your mind is prepared to see a lot of pictures & comics style reading like you probably saw in this book:

Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition

I would say - if you want easy book to read on a topic - take a Steve's book, but of you are ready to serious brain wash with a topics starting from Myer/Briggs personas (same topic is covered by another great book - Waiting for your cat to bark, from Eisenberg brothers), probability theory, quantitative approaches, and other similar issues - then this book is for you.

Just do not expect the easy go read. This is what I wanted to say

Certain types of advice go without saying; eat your vegetables, listen to your mother, look both ways before crossing the street. In his new book Landing Page Optimization, Tim Ash reminds us of fundamental landing page design concepts that seem simple. But we all (at least occasionally) fall into the trap of forgetting them when designing a page.

Landing Page Optimization starts and ends with a very simple premise: you are not the expert in designing an effective landing page -- your customers are. You may feel that you have pegged the perfect message, the right layout and the simplest form. You reason you derived all of these elements from an exact understanding of who is visiting the website and why. Truth is, you haven't. Your design most likely rests on how you see your product or service, how you structure your company, what your CEO likes, or any number of other things that have little or nothing to do with the customer's needs. Swallow your pride, trust your customers to tell you what they want through their actions, and give it to them.

Tim asserts the basic principle that your page must appeal to the emotional responses of the visitor. Make them feel welcome, safe and connected to your site. Unfortunately, you don't have the time to explain to them why they should trust and commit. Visitors devote only a few seconds to your landing page, and you must make the most of these seconds. Assume no one wants to read your lengthy descriptions. Communicate quickly with images and bulleted lists, with your overall goal of maximizing conversions constantly in mind.

Tim has delivered a must-read book for every level of an organization that wants to make its website and online marketing efforts successful. Far from being a book for any one job title, Landing Page Optimization gives everyone in an organization a solid foundation for how to think about customers, how that relates to design, and how to test sites with maximizing conversions in mind. Each person involved in landing page design must think about how each element on the landing page helps or hinders a visitor's ability to understand immediately who the site owner is, conclude there's a solid benefit for them, and trust the site owner with their information.

In all, Landing Page Optimization provides a valuable look at the factors we should consider when evaluating the effectiveness of any landing page. This excellent read will leave you saying, "I knew that! Why haven't I been doing this all along?!?"

This book may be the best thing since sliced bread for you, or can be practically useless. It has an extensive focus on Joe web surfer's persona, on why and how he behaves on the web. It also explains basic concepts such as A-B split testing, ROI, and gives a few examples from author's consulting background. There's a few mathematical formulas, which I am sure are excellent for marketing folks.

But what completely lacks from this book is THE WHAT and THE HOW. The "Uncovering Problems" section is surprisingly small and has no real value. It is explainable - the later part of the book is nothing but a marketing promo of author's consulting business. This costs author 1 star in my review.

The second star I remove because this book is completely useless for small to medium business. If you are a company with under $20 million in revenue - which is where 99% of websites belong - this book is not going to help you much.

Could a book that would obviously be about grabbing a web surfer's attention for commercial purposes be helpful to someone who wasn't particularly concerned about `conversions'? In this case, absolutely yes. If you can allow your mind to think outside the box just a bit, this book can really provide some helpful advice which can be easily translated to your particular goal.

Mr. Ash assumes you know what you want to do but nevertheless gently nudges you with reminders of the many things which you should be considering. Complex - but necessary - concepts are explained in context and without boring definitions so that you can smile smugly with the sure and steadfast knowledge that you've always understood things like Full Factorial Non-Parametric Testing. After a few pages, you'll be eager to make meaningful changes to your own website!

This book is well written and contains a lot of great content about Internet marketing. It was written by three CEO's whom have made their own success. I would say that its focus is more from the serious business perspective than for the armature home business newbie looking for some "how to?". But still this book was definitely worth my time. It was easily worth my 12 dollars! This book has many references which will really help out and all the theory is backed by statistics making all the data very convincing. I am sure that if any of those dot com's had this data, there would be more of them still around :)

One of the hardest things about being successful on the Internet is keeping up with the pace at which the playing field keeps changing. I found this book to be extremely well-written, and more importantly, presents information in a way that's not dated by the time you've read it. It's good, simple, common-sense advice for what works. Loved the case studies. It's an invaluable resource for entrepreneurs who can benefit from others' experiences.

There are many titles that deal with the topic of web marketing. Net Results.2 stands head and shoulders above the rest. It addresses the complexities faced by both novice and experienced marketers and provides solid, understandable advice for achieving success at either level. Great case studies help pull the advice into context and give the reader insight into tried and true methodologies that really work. The real beauty of this book, however, is that it provides AFFORDABLE advice for how to garner online success and build traffic. I believe that many of the now failed dot.com startups would still be around today had they heeded the advice available in Net Results.2.

Bought this to read over the weekend. Was a very good read, but what I found amazing is at least 1/3 off the web resources they list are either dead links or offer a totally different services than what was discussed in the book. Great for basics, great ideas - but they really need to update the book (which I would buy)

NetResults.2 is an overview of what is necessary to market a web site. Nine chapters explain things from Investment Goals to Public Relations. Each chapter has pictorial examples of the explanation and a Resource section at the end of each chapter. The book is printed in an easy-to-read font, large enough to make reading a breeze.

The Content section contains seven pages, an appendix of Internet Resources is nine-pages and the index section is seventeen pages long making it user-friendly. On each cover is an extra "turn over" so you can "bookmark" where you stopped reading and as an added incentive, the book cover is plastisized so you can read and drink your coffee without fear of spillage!

The thing I like about this book is that it ranges from basics to advanced development strategizing. It seems to have been developed for use by individuals as well as in a (relaxed, hip?) classroom situation. I read it on my own, but can imagine it's structure making the teacher's job easy. As an "international reader," I think this book offers good insights into the workings of the U.S. corporate web economy... valuable when thinking about new directions for developing websites in one's own country.

I'm working on a re=design of a non-profit site and had expected this book (based on the title) to give me some real-world design advice. Instead, the book focuses on the design PROCESS itself. Things like knowing who your users / customers are and what they need from your site, getting buy-in from the site owners, prototyping, testing, etc. And even then the amount of real "take-away" information is scant (in my opinion). I had used another book (The Design of Sites - highly recommend) and must have bookmarked (the old fashioned way) 100 or more pages. On Ms. Phyo's book I found only 6 pages to be valuable (to me). If you're in the market to set up a web design team or business, this is a good book. If you're looking for decent web design help, look elsewhere. My 2-cents.

I'm no expert on Web design. However, I do spend a great deal of time fiddling with badly desined web sites. Certainly everyone has encountered a web site that made them want to scream.

I do understand what is involved in building a web site, we build them regularly. Ani Phyo is very intuitive and approaches her subject matter with great finessse. I have interacted with sites that she and her partner have designed and clearly, they get it. Not only are the sites intuitive and smart but they take it to the next level. They have an organic nature that transcends what you'd expect on the web. Their sites are breathing, living organisms. To encounter them is to be a part of a community. Yes, a community! Isn't that what the Internet is all about?

I highly recommend this book mostly for the client. The client needs to define their needs and comprehend what is possible. The designer can take it to the next level.

Finally, someone has written the book that describes the best way to think about designing interactive media. As a professional web designer/architect, I've found Ani really nails it in terms of process, and will help me cover my bases better. I recommend this book for beginners, who can now start out right the first time. And for veteran web people, this is a comprehensive, clear document of the methodology you might have been using for years, but may have cut corners on. My copy is going to have lots of dog-ears...

If you ever wanted a 7-step recipe for designing applications for Web delivery, this is the book for you. I appreciate the time and money I am saving on my current Web project by following a tested process that really works.
Regardless if you are responsible for site management, defining system requirements, Web content development, visual design, back-end programming, or usability testing of Web-delivered applications, following this process is both cost effective and fun. Return on Design is a gourmet meal consisting of step-by-step procedures, supportive examples, visuals, resources, and a consistent information design approach, which all serve to differentiate this Web design book from the others.
The bottom line is: do you want your site to be revenue generating? Your chances for success are better if you follow a user-centered design "recipe" for success.

If you love cats, and you love the Web, this book is for you! Innovative, creative and funny! Take time to look over all the Web sites in the book -- there's lots of great material (and great cat photos too!).

In a format that reminds me of the old Mad magazines, Jon Mathis and Mary Shomon have compiled a book of web sites for cats called "Scratching the 'Net" that would make a great gift for anyone who loves both computers and cats. My favorite site was for Ross Purr-oh, who is apparently still running for president (backed by United We Purr, of course!). Shaper Claw has several pages of its on-line catalog, featuring items such as the Spray-Away Robot, for those times when the cat just can't be there to protect its territory.

From the web sites to the tool bar (including such buttons as Back to Sleep, Open One Eye, and Find Toys), this book is definitely a cat's eye view of the Internet.

I give it 5 purrs and a good lick!

Best book to receive for Christmas: light, smart and fun to read! Pokes fun at humans without offending cats; G-rated for the whole family and cat-lovers from 2 to 82. I'll never again sit at my computer without wondering what my cat Tiger has been up to overnight.

This may become your favorite "coffee table" book, as it is not one to read once and put away. You'll find yourself coming back again and again to pore through this devilishly delightful spoof of web pages for cats. Just spend a few minutes absorbing "Deepcat Chowdown's 'The Seven Spiritual Laws of Laziness' " and if you aren't chuckling with delight, you have no sense of humor at all. Every page is designed to tickle and titillate, with outstanding success.

I don't like cats. Never did. I'm a dog person, but reading this funny book (someone gave it to me), made me laugh out loud. I hope the authors come up with something as great for dog lovers! It was a perfect break from the ever so serious world of the net.

This book was fun, lightly suspenseful and magical. I could really relate to the characters. Very nice!

The magic has drawn you to this book! In this book Song of the Unicorns, by Rachel Roberts, there are three girls who have magical gems and powers. Adrian is fearless and brave. Emily is happy-going and caring. Kara is the drama-queen.
The book starts out in New Mexico. In this book the three mages find baby unicorns. The unicorns grow their horns and become more magical. But an evil warrior comes to steal the unicorns' newly attained magic. The unicorns, helpless with out their magic, will surly not survive, or will they? Read the book to find out. In my opinion this book is thrilling. It keeps you on the edge of your seat. It is full of magical action. If you like fantasy, you will love this book. I myself think this book is perfect. The book is absolutely thrilling!

This book is Awesome!! This book totally deserves 100 stars. Emily invites her friends with her Colrado to visit her dad thouh she tries to get along with her step mother. Anyways she then finds these baby unicorns and quickly has to send them to Dalrida before somebody else will capture them first. U must read this book it is awesome and you won't regret it.

Now starting the quest for magic series the adventure contuines as Emily invites her friends to New Mexico but... is upset with her dad's new wife and Emily tries to ignore her.As Emily and the rest of the group things are going to be normal their wrong big time. Baby unicorns come to Earth and the mages quickly have to send them back to Dalradia before this evil knight will capture them first. As they will Emily the healer has this dream thats almost like a vision of what may become of the unicorns if their to late to save them.

Bingo! I've been waiting for this ever since I saw it advertised, and it was even better than I thought it would be! It's a great doorway to another Avalon series with great new characters. The mages seem to have gotten quite a handle on their magic--well, except for Kara, who's having problems with hers.

And the big question that's answered is--is the magic always there, even if you sacrifice it?

Come to this book! It's calling to you. Listen! Hear it???

This book provides a great foundation for the classes I am teaching in e-commerce. It's chapters on site server also are excellent! I found the fundamentals section to be outstanding for handling the task of getting new students up to speed.

This book is really useful from the standpoint of providing an overview of what ESD is doing today, and how e-commerce tools from Microsoft are making it possible for organizations of any size to buyild their own sites. I found the chapters on managing a new site useful with some good suggestions for getting everyone on the same page from a development standpoint. Good reference book and teaching tool for new administrators.

I have been studying up on e-business and found this book to have a personable tone and many insights into how I could get up to speed quickly with terms and concpets to manage the outsourcing of our company's website quicker. I liked the chapters on building a framework for organizing solutions and found the chapter on electronic software ditribution very enlightening. An easy book to read.

This book has interesting information about Microsoft's Site Server applications, and shows the plans for electronic software distribution Microsoft authored with key industry leaders. it is decidely pro e-commerce and provides an interesting approach to managing web development through cross-functional project teams.

I found this book to provide a level-set for my staff, who is working on the definition of our websites, and what we could reasonably expect with the resources onhand. This book gave us hands-on guidelines and advice from experience we could use for getting our site completed in the minimum amount of time with the least disconnects between what we wanted and what we ended up creating. E-Commerce is constantly changing, and this book brings all the change into perspective. Good teaching tool.

I love this book. It should be required reading for all undergraduate and graduate business students. I'll be looking for Windham's next book.

I must congratulate Ms. Windham on her excellent book "Dead Ahead". I think I must have read it more than three times by now. I am a consultant and my company is involved in web design and development. On many of my assignments, I relied on this book as a guide and many of her ideas have worked very well with my clients.

Our company provides e-commerce and web presence solutions. We use "Dead Ahead: The Web Dilemma and the New Rules of Business" by Laurie Windham extensively to help us provide effective solutions for our clients.

Dead Ahead covers the 'new rules' of web-based commerce, from using existing businesses and strategies to succeed to establishing recognition and associations via the internet. Important chapters on investing in the right technology and conducting e-business make for important insights on the rules and atmosphere of the web.

This was used as a text book in my e-business MBA class and would recommend it to others outside of class. It covered a lot of issues relevant to the topic. I enjoy reading books like this that are up-to-date in a dynamic industry.

This is definitively a must have in the bookshelf of all .NET AD Developers. I have been working with ADAM since .NET 1.1 and have always struggle to find answers to simple questions like how to make an LDAP query to run efficiently or how to define complex queries; this book has that and a lot more.

This book is everything I was hoping it would be. I'm working on a project where I need to get computer accounts from AD (TENS of THOUSANDS of them) and move, delete, enable, disable and set account expiration dates. Everything I need to know is in this book. The AD paged search, useraccount properties, etc. Some of the routines I was able to use as-is (the VB versions from their web site download). These guys do a great job of explaining all the stuff I couldn't find anywhere else. Highly reccomended!

This book is great for anyone who does AD programming with .NET it covers everything from the basics to some pretty advanced stuff and even some undocumented stuff.. a must have for AD Programemrs!

If you are or may be in the future, doing directory services programming then this book is a must have. It also suffices a quick reference as it has code sprinkled around so that you can get up to speed quickly.

If anything, it is sort of lacking on other LDAP directories. It does have the history of LDAP and does show where the differences are between AD and the others.

If your primary focus is other directories, this may not be the end all book for you, but should still suffice as a reference.

If AD is your main focus, buy this now, you won't be disappointed.

This is a very good book for[...] developers who wants to program against Active Directory. There are some good examples in this book that can be very handy. Other than examples in pieces, there is not a project or Web Site codes that a beginner could use.

If you want to understand programming the Flash Communication Server and it's capabilities this is a good place to start.

Although I'm using Flash Media Server 2, this book is still highly relevant as not much has changed. The core objects and language is the same so I would not hesitate to recommend it for anyone looking to use FMS.

This book is all about the design of applications using Macromedia's Flash Communication Server MX. FCS MX enables the building of media-rich web applications by taking care of the basic tasks required in the networking of the applications. Thus, you can focus on the application itself rather than worrying about low-level communication details.

Since this book is concerned with situations where multiple Flash applications will be executing on the same server simultaneously, there is going to be considerable effort involved in coordinating events, which is addressed by this book. You should already have FCS installed and running on your server and you should also have Flash MX available on the client. The following is description of the book by chapter:

Chapter 1, Introducing the Flash Communication Server - Acts as an introduction to FCS and an overview of the whole book.

Chapter 2, Communication Components - How the FlashCom communication components encapsulate commonly needed features such as chat, video recording and playback, bandwidth control,and user configuration. These components implement many basic building blocks for your application.

Chapter 3, Managing Connections - This chapter covers connections in more depth past the SimpleConnect component, including how to write custom code to handle various changes in the connection status as well as different errors.

Chapter 4, Applications, Instances, and Server-Side ActionScript - This chapter describes how to write Server-Side ActionScript and work with the objects that control application instances and the Flash movies that connect to them.

Chapter 5, Managing Streams - Offers a somewhat oversimplified but complete example that shows the basic steps in publishing one live stream and subscribing to a second.

Chapter 6, Camera and Microphone - This chapter explains how to use both the Microphone and Camera classes to record live streams. These classes are at the heart of most communication applications involving multimedia.

Chapter 7, Media Preparation and Delivery - This chapter covers many details for compressing and streaming audio and video.

Chapter 8, Shared Objects - This chapter starts an entirely new subject - shared objects, which provide a mechanism for the transmission of data between client and server.

Chapter 9, Remote Methods - This chapter also shows how to broadcast method calls to every movie and application instance connected to a shared object or stream, or send them to and from individual movies using RMI.

Chapter 10, Server Management API - Discusses the Server Management API and its applications, including monitoring a FlashCom Server, gathering statistics on application instances, and managing the log streams.

Chapter 11, Flash Remoting - Demonstrates how Flash Remoting can be used to add data connectivity to FlashCom applications. Flash Remoting can access web services, server-side scripts, CGI applications, XML files, or the local filesystem with the help of an application server such as ColdFusion.

Chapter 12, ColdFusion MX and FlashCom - Teaches some specifics involved in using Flash Remoting with ColdFusion MX and FlashCom. There are some practical working examples shown that demonstrate how you can leverage the benefits of Flash Remoting in conjunction with FlashCom.

Chapter 13, Building Communication Components - This is the first step in building complete applications, and is demonstrated through an extensive example.

Chapter 14, Understanding the Macromedia Component Framework - How to modify an existing component and how to create a new one. Also discusses server-side framework code and its core features and data structures.

Chapter 15, Application Design Patterns and Best Practices - Describes some of the best practices available to application developers. This chapter provides some useful design options, patterns, and best practices that will help you build better applications.

Chapter 16, Building Scalable Applications - Deals with building multi-instance and multiserver applications that don't bog down as the number of client connections increases.

Chapter 17, Network Performance, Latency, Concurrency - Traditional network design issues affect FCS also.

Chapter 18, Securing Applications - Specifically this chapter examines the three A's of security - Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting.

Excellent book, stuffed of examples very well explained, easy to read and to understand, essential for who desires initiate or even though to profound itself studies on FlashCom.
Obligator reference in projects involving FlashCom, either for fast consultations and advanced tasks.
Excellent approach of subjects as Design patterns and security, yonder a perfect demonstration about audio, video and much more.

If you're a developer looking into real-time server communication using Adobe Flash, this book is a must-have. It guides you thru various levels of application development in an easy to understand format, and provides well documented pieces of code to assist you in the learning process of putting together your project:

Topics covered include:

- learning about components and how to use them
- establishing and managing client connections
- publishing live and recorded streams
- local communication with clients
- remote communication with outside applications

The book also shows how to build and integrate your own custom components, and how to scale your application using the components that you've created. Other highlights include information on how to use shared objects and server management API, as well as ways to improve both design and performance.