Authoring Books

People no longer just search for information on the web. Now they provide information, too. These people include our students. The world has changed; students have changed, and traditional schools are no longer up to the task of educating young people for the future.

This is the argument of the book Web 2.0: New Tools, New Schools. Although we're still in the early days of bringing together education and Web 2.0, there are good models of learning and technology use that point us in the right direction.

The authors provide examples of teachers who have guided their students to use Web 2.0 tools in creating a collaborative math solutions manual, an independent literature circle project, a collaborative guidebook about online security, for example.

Solomon and Schrum observe that, although young people may be ahead of their teachers in using these tools, teachers can help them use the tools in educationally appropriate ways.

I think it's a useful books for those who want to know more about web2 and desire to start using web2 in educational contexts especially in classes which creative writing and written collaboration is desired.

Web Development Solutions: Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy by Christian Heilmann and Mark Norman Francis left me with mixed feelings. The title lead me to believe there would be some more in-depth information related to the topics, but in reality the end of the title should have been Using Wordpress. The majority of this book focuses on Wordpress and how each of the topics relate to the blogging platform.

The reason I had mixed emotions is because on one hand, the authors made it seem as though web development is so easy your Grandma could do it, while on the other hand sliding in some disclaimers about needing more knowledge on different topics. I think that this book would give someone just enough material to be dangerous, but not enough to really understand web development as a whole. This book is geared to the beginner in web development, so I was hoping for some more solid material.

With that out of the way, lets take a closer look at the book and its contents:

The first chapter simply discusses the reason for starting up a website in the first place. There are many different reasons for many different people as to why they start a site. Some start for financial reasons (make money and advertising), while others start to share photos with family and friends. This chapter discussed several of these reasons for starting a website.

Chapter two was where the book really started to take off. This chapter discusses the Dilemma of "Rolling your Own" Solutions. We also get a brief crash course in several aspects related to web development.

The author gets you started by installing a local server on your machine with PHP and MySQL. After this is completed, the authors walk through an installation of Wordpress as we begin our journey. Basically every chapter after this will use Wordpress in one way or another.

This is where things get somewhat fuzzy. The chapters related to Ajax, APIs, and Libraries all revolve around Wordpress. The topics are not discussed in depth, but merely show you how to install an array of different plugins available to the Wordpress platform. Flickr, Youtube, Odeo, and Google Maps--all of which are presented as plugins for Wordpress.

The last few chapters involved some good discussions on promoting your content, navigation and layout, and finally--how to get help when you hit a roadblock. The last chapter really made this book worth the read, as it discussed the different ways to get help, the places to go, and how to ask for help in the different communities. There are some very helpful and important tips in this chapter as you seek help from your peers and colleagues.

Overall, the book was not a bad read--it just left me with mixed emotions due to the title of the book. The authors are very knowledgeable and that shows in each of the chapters. Though I felt the book made things look so easy, the authors were sure to point out that the solutions there were not in-depth, but enough to get you started. If you are just beginning your trek into web development, then this book would be a good read to get you up and running in no time flat. However--for long term involvement in the web, or a more in-depth discussion of the topics listed in the title, you may want to grab a few more books.

I just finished reading Web Development Solutions by Christian Heilmann and Mark Norman Francis. It would be a great book for anyone who is just starting out in web development, and wants to make the jump from the world of WYSIWYG web tools, to the world of hand-coding and really understanding the underlying principles of best practices. It covers a broad range of topics, from WordPress blogs to Microformats, Ajax and APIs.

It would also be an ideal book for anyone using WordPress, who wants to really push it to the limits. The first several chapters cover some of the basics, as far as installing blog software both locally and remotely. There are examples of those who are "living the dream" blogging full-time, with financial support.

The latter chunk of chapters covers more granular details of web-dev, such as XHTML, CSS and JavaScript. Various JS libraries are described, including: jQuery, Mootools and YUI. Fundamentals of Ajax and REST are discussed, as well as how to incorporate off-site web services to spruce up your metadata. Doctypes are explained, and how this affects various browsers such as IE6 rendering standards compliance mode, rather than quirks.

Some of the basics around SEO are also covered, so that your website or blog is as visible as possible to automated search engine crawlers. Implicitly, anything good for bots is also good for accessibility, and gracefully degradable enhancements are illustrated. Such examples including using Google Maps.

Overall, this is a great introductory book for anyone looking to enhance their knowledge beyond that of hobbyist blogger to more of a true web developer. It covers the full spectrum of considerations, from self-promotional Digg links on blog posts, to some of the more in-depth DOM Scripting techniques out there. Fundamentals are far too often overlooked, but they are tackled well here.

This book serves as both an excellent introduction to Webdav to get you up the learning curve AND a reference volume to dip into when needed. Great for any programmers needing to get a Webdav 'something' done.

Also, a pleasant surprise to find the index is actually useful.

This book is both a great review of the HTTP protocol and takes you from tutorial into the details of WebDAV. I had to write a WebDAV client and server application and this book make the work much easier.

It is obvious that the author has had experience with real applications and customer needs.

I don't think the description "The only Expression Web book you need" is correct.

It is a book designed for web developers. It is not designed for relatively new web designers. Even though I have built many sites using Frontpage, this book was confusing to read.

One of the key components of a website is navigation, yet in a book with 720 pages, only 20 pages is devoted to navigation, and then only using ASP.NET, so if your webhost doesn't support ASP.NET you are out of luck.

It is a great technical manual for developers, but there are more clear and structured books for web designers.

I bought this book based on the many very positive reviews it received, and maybe my expectations were unrealistic.

I'm new to web design, so I'm learning a lot of things at once. I was hoping that this book would make the Expression part of the learning curve feel a little less steep, and it did help. But it did not answer all of the many questions I have. Possilby I'm so unsophisticated that the answers are right in front of me and I don't see them.

I ended up using the templates that come with Expression Web to figure most things out. I do use the book as a reference, but I'm certain that I've read all of the chapters before the 'troubleshooting' and more advanced coding stuff begins, and I still have a lot of work ahead of me.

If this is the only book I'll ever need, I'm a little depressed about it. I could use more help.

I need a book that tells me how to get something onto the screen(there are so many drop down menues)then tell me what to do with it.This book goes on about something that you don't understand and can't even put on the screen to work with and learn.

Book is a waste of money and worse a waste of good time.
Walt

If you use expression, this book is for you, learn everything there is to learn!

Anyone who used FrontPage knows who Jimco is and knows that he is the master of FrontPage. When Microsoft got rid of FrontPage and gave us Expression Web, Jimco picked up the ball and ran with it. The result is this book.

Like alot of people who were new to Expression Web, I had trouble with moving to CSS and starting to use ASP.Net to replace all of the FrontPage bots that I found missing in Expression Web. This book taught me everything I needed to know to get up to speed on building a website that complies with today's standards.

I originally didn't review this book, but when I saw that someone had criticized it for not telling you exactly what to do to build your website, I had to write one. In my opinion a book that tells you WHAT to do when you are developing a site is a bad thing. I would rather be educated so that I can make my own decision and that's just what this book does. If you want someone to treat you like an idiot and just tell you what to do then this book isn't for you.

Great book. My favorite and I've got a few.

I thought this book was well researched and presented in a way that anyone could relate to. It certainly aids someone desiring to learn all they can about building websites with CS2.

Good price, quick delivery, and brand new. All positive feedback. The only slightly negative thing is one of the corners of the book was damaged, but the book is fully usable.

I have taken several classes to learn Dreamweaver but still didn't handle to use Dreamweaver very well...until I found this book which answered all the questions I had to master Dreamweaver. This book is the best book out there so far for beginner; A must have.

I had to buy this book for a class, it is terrible. All the author does is have you go click here and drag this to go through the exercises with no explainations. It's a waste of time and money.

This has to be the worst book ever written. Do yourself a favor, and spare yourself from the pain. The author thinks it's cute to make little quips that a 3 year might think of and put little wink things behind them, you know what I mean ;). The problem is they just annoy you to no end. The other annoying thing is that it takes the author a page and half to say "Hit the Enter Key". He spends page after page talking of inane things, hawking other books, and making stupid, juvenile comments. The book is a laborious 700 pages long, an agonizing 700 pages long. I have noticed that they have fired the dweeb who wrote it, Garo Green (who I always imagined him as a pasty white, fat 50 year old geek-you'll see what I mean if you have the misfortune of being forced to use this book), and significantly shorten the book, even though Dreamweaver 8 has many more features. I write this with the full knowledge that I will be selling my copy of this at the end of the semester, and that this review will adversely affect my selling price, but the book is really that bad. Unless you need it for a course, do not buy it. I promise you will regret it.

This is not the best written book. I am learning a lot of stuff about FrontPage 2002, but I while reading the book I get the filling that it was by more than one person. Sometimes the 1st person is used, sometimes it is not. The steps in the books are not always clear and are overly wordy. Some of the steps seem to over explain process that had already be explain earlier, almost as if the author did not realize he had already explain them. You can learn with this book, but unless you're buying it at a very discounted price, by some other book.

While this book is good at providing an overview of all of the features that are contained within FP, do not even try to use it as a reference book. The steps are so geared to his specific downloaded examples that you cannot translate the steps to whatever you are working on. More theory and less "...and now do this..." kind of content would have been way more helpful. The number of typos are extraordinary - here is my favorite "...you can set an included page with the text Welcome to automatically change to Merry Christams on December 31." Merry Christmas, Mr. Channathambi!

This books is excellent if you are new to FrontPage or web design. The book is easy to read, provides good examples, and covers the key features of FrontPage plus a little more: website design, organization, images, tables, forms (email, confirmation pages, etc.). Though much of FrontPage's features (font, inserting images, tables, etc.) works similarly to MS Word, PowerPoint, or Publisher, I found Kirupa's book useful.

STRENGTHS
1. Easy to read and well-organized intro to the basics of FrontPage.
2. Kirupa has a website that serves as a valuable (and free) companion to the book. There, you can download examples of FrontPage functions and designs mentioned throughout his book. There's also discussion forum, among other information.
3.Kirupa personally answers questions via email. I sent him an email with a FrontPage question last night and got a response back from this afternoon. That's impressive.

OPPORTUNITY AREAS
I would rate the book with five stars if:
1. It included a very basic glossary of the key tools and inputs used in FrontPage. Kirupa provides excellent "how to" instructions to do a very specific task, e.g. "Click here, then click there, etc." However, in many cases, FrontPage gives you many other options within the same tool bar function. Without a glossary, it's hard to know why he chose not to click on the other options available.
2. I think there may be an over-reliance on learning FrontPage by rote. I like Kirupa's "training seminar approach", but the shortfall is that we rely a lot on his downloadable examples. Again, we follow his step-by-step instructions, but we don't really know why we click on "this" and not on "that".

Overall, the benefits of the book outweigh the opportunities. One must keep in mind that the book is meant for beginners, and Kirupa does a solid job here. I guess Kirupa taught the basics of FrontPage so quickly and easily that one can't help but want a detailed glosary in order to start learning some of the more advanced functions!

Front Page 2002: A beginner's guide - does a decent job of teaching you Frontpage, but it is overly simplistic. It takes forever to learn core tasks. The main fault I found with the book is that it is NOT concise! In a manual of this type, you want the author to get to the key points, efficiently communicate what you need to know, and move on. This book fails in this regard. That said, to it's credit, if you have the time, it does eventually get around to explaining how to use front page.

This books is excellent if you are new to FrontPage or web design. The book is easy to read, provides good examples, and covers the key features of FrontPage plus a little more: website design, organization, images, tables, forms (email, confirmation pages, etc.). Though much of FrontPage's features (font, inserting images, tables, etc.) works similarly to MS Word, PowerPoint, or Publisher, I found Kirupa's book useful.

STRENGTHS
1. Easy to read and well-organized intro to the basics of FrontPage.
2. Kirupa has a website ... that serves as a valuable (and free) companion to the book. There, you can download examples of FrontPage functions and designs mentioned throughout his book. There's also discussion forum, among other information.
3. Kirupa personally answers questions via email. I sent him an email with a FrontPage question last night and got a response back from this afternoon. That's impressive.

OPPORTUNITY AREAS
I would rate the book with five stars if:
1. It included a very basic glossary of the key tools and inputs used in FrontPage. Kirupa provides excellent "how to" instructions to do a very specific task, e.g. "Click here, then click there, etc." However, in many cases, FrontPage gives you many other options within the same tool bar function. Without a glossary, it's hard to know why he chose not to click on the other options available.
2. I think there may be an over-reliance on learning FrontPage by rote. I like Kirupa's "training seminar approach", but the shortfall is that we rely a lot on his downloadable examples. Again, we follow his step-by-step instructions, but we don't really know why we click on "this" and not on "that".

Overall, the benefits of the book outweigh the opportunities. One must keep in mind that the book is meant for beginners, and Kirupa does a solid job here. I guess Kirupa taught the basics of FrontPage so quickly and easily that one can't help but want a detailed glosary in order to start learning some of the more advanced functions!

This guy makes it all look so easy..He repeats the steps..explains them in english, and really helps you "get it". For all you peeps learning the trivial program, FLASH..YOu need this. I bought this to supplement the class I was taking on Flash cause my teacher couldn't explain it half as good as this book/CD did.

Oh god this book is really horrible
after reading the whole book you will find your self able to make simple and silly motion and nothing more
the worst thing in this book is that you should watch the author speaking to you in a very silly way
you can't get any ready examples of this book you will find it wanting you to do everything , the whole series of steps and , if you have some trouble in one of the steps you cannot do the whole example
flash is a simple program but the worst thing about it for a beginner that when he faces little problems he wont be able to solve it because he can not find out what is the problem !! and this book don't teach you how to find out what is the problem and instead of this , this stupid book will make suffer more of these things especially when doing some long examples in this book
I am sure that this book don't worth a single penny

Okay, as far as flash books goes this is just like all the rest. Giving you your basic info on Flash 5. No big deal. Whats totally missing with this book is the companion CD has some lessons, but there more like very quick explanations of how to create certain elements in flash. The explanations are to quick to follow and at the same time the CD comes with know .fla files for you to follow along in flash while you view the movies. This would have been great to see as an addition is the actuall files so that you could try out what the heck this guy is talking about. Another thing I have problems with is this guy just does not impress me with his teaching act. He's just to goofy. For some reason I just could not wrap myself around his personality.. Get someone who has a presence. Someone you can say this guys for real... Hire an actor or something... Id have to say this is just another quick release book and the virtual classroom aspect is not up to par.... If you can get the book for ... its worth it I guess for a first time book, but if youve already bought a few flash books and your looking for something with some guts and very finely tuned tutorials to follow along and really get what there saying, this is not the book..... Bubba

Ever look at web sites and see all the special effects included and wonder why you can't do that? Ever want to add Flash products to your pages and think that you didn't have enough smarts to do it? Well the time has come to get a hold of this cd/book combination and begin teaching yourself the things you need to know.

Putting things in a step by step mode of learning and using the cd to follow along you'll begin creating flash layout in no time flat. Learning things like the basics of flash, creating graphic objects, then modifying and creating complex objects.

Also you begin to build symbols, animations in a frame by frame layout, create buttons, movies and then add sounds and finally publish what you create. Overall this book will help even those with little or no computer or web design experience

As a Flash fanatic, I own 5 "Bible" to "Reference" Flash books: most of them thick and heavy. I wanted to learn and master Flash as quickly as possible without going to or pay its classes hundreds to thousands of $. So, I didn't (don't) have time nor patience reading through some loquacious-professor-speaking nor I'll-entertain-you w/ nonsensical stuffs.

This is my favorite tutorial/quick reference book in that the contents are clear and concise to the point with pertinent illustrations. The CD-rom is as equally excellent. It is a stream video lessons that are practical and applicable to your sites. I wish I had owned this book as my first Flash book. It would have saved me so much time and money. I look forward to reading more of his books.

I had a little HTML knowledge when I bought and installed Dreamweaver MX, but no web design experience. I was afraid to even open it! I bought this book because it was recommended for beginners. It starts by holding your hand and walking you through the workspace explaining all the tool bars and panels and how they're docked. I laugh now at, "Rest the pointer over a button to see it's name", but I wasn't laughing when I started the book.

Training From The Source guides you through creating a web site about light houses called "Lights of the Coast". Although I never want to see another light house after completing the lessons, it was an excellent way of applying what I was learning. I also liked the list of "What You Will Learn" at the start of each chapter, and "What You Have Learned" at the end of each chapter, to keep me on track. The illustrations are numerous and just what I needed back when I was afraid to touch anything.

There is a huge amount of information throughout the book I previously knew nothing about. Reading and working through it saved me from a lot of headaches when I set off on my own. Good book!

As a new Dreamweaver MX user and web designer with a moderate degree of experience using Windows applications, I felt that this book offered wonderful examples presented in a clear and coherent manner. The source material was solid and there were no instances when I wondered where the author had gotten to. I was comfortable with the pace and wasn't bothered by any code or textual errors, as are present in many other tutorial guides. Dreamweaver MX: Training from the Source stands out as a one-stop springboard. Given decent language reference books, I feel like I can go anywhere with this.

I was familiar with pre-MX versions of Dreamweaver, and this book allowed a great refresher course that cleaned a few cobwebs and taught many new features along the way. Teaching method very similar to hands-on projects/case studies in college; the best method to learn the myriad of the software's capabilities is to apply it! Included file disk makes it easy to skip ahead to lessons for more advanced users (i.e. each lesson comes with its up-to-this-respective-lesson's files, such that lesson 10 does not require you to successfully complete lessons 1-9; just copy lesson 10's files!)

For those users looking to start a static website (v. dynamic...do a simple websearch if you don't know the difference) this book is a GREAT starting point. Taking your site to the dynamic level will require - prepare yourself for this - the "DYNAMIC Applications" edition (book 2 of this series). I could not help but pick this book up as well.

For intermediate users, expect the "time approximation" for each section to be a conservative measure. I find that if it says it will take an hour, I usually get through it in 30-45 minutes, pending restroom breaks.

One word of advice: the entire project may seem overwhelming looking at its entirety. However, breaking it down lesson by lesson, you will find that the piecemeal approach avoids the intimidation factor associated with the overall project. It's quite impressive to finish the series and look back to from where you started!

I must admit when I first opened this book (even though I still decided to keep it anyway), I found the amount of text and steps in each chapter rather daunting -- so I became a little impatient, set the book aside for 6 months and avoided using Dreamweaver MX altogether. Since I primarily do web design as a hobby, I wondered if I was getting in over my head with version MX.

Recently, I've been asked to redesign our company's website and decided it would be a good time to finally dive in and learn MX (I have used Dreamweaver 3 exclusively since 1999 and never upgraded to version 4). So far, I have found this book to be very helpful and have gone though most of the lessons in 3 days!!

I picked up lots of great tips and new ways to use the software that I did not originally anticipate. The chapter on Cascading Style Sheets was especially informative and clear, and I no longer feel intimidated about using them in a website (and now feel silly that I never did...).

Overall, the book is an excellent resource if you have the patience to read LOTS of copy, but all the essential features of the software are thoroughly covered. The book provided a solid foundation for learning the basics and I found it to be a good review. The chapters could have used a few more illustrations, but were packed with lots of substance.

Is this book for advanced users? Probably not -- but for the rest of us, it's a useful guide to MX.

If you are looking for a book to help you to learn the basics of Dreamweaver MX, then you have found it in this one. The chapters and lessons are well-designed to teach the concepts.

Back when I got this book, I was already very experienced with web design and tools, but not with Dreamweaver. This book teaches both Dreamweaver and a lot of basic web design concepts. So, I was able to skim over some sections that were too basic and still gain familiarity with DW.

The time estimates for each chapter were a bit too generous. I finished one chapter 45 minutes faster than they had estimated. Others were closer to being accurate. It makes sense that the time estimates would be off by some amount, depending upon the level of the reader.

Some of the chapters have an "on your own" bonus exercise at the end where one can apply the skills they just covered to building a web page with no step-by-step instructions. That is where you will find out if you were paying attention in the earlier parts of the chapter. Don't skip these bonus lessons!

I needed a way to get up to speed with DW and this book did the trick. Dreamweaver simplifies a lot of tasks that I had been performing manually, so learning it has made me more efficient in my work. This book, and Dreamweaver, are great investments for people who desire to craft attractive web sites in less time. The return on investment was almost immediate for me.

The book pays for itself quickly.

I bought this book hoping that this book would shed some additional light on Dreamweaver MX templates. Mistake!!!! I found that the first 150 pages are very technical and would have been more useful if there were some excerises to augment the explanations. I have been using lots of Dreamweaver MX books lately and this is one of the poorest that I have come across. The authors are writing in a way that is hard to understand. I have also purchased Dreamweaver MX Magic and I found that much easeir to learn from mainly because the points that the authors are trying to make are made through supporting exercises. I was forced to rate this as one star but i feel that this book doesn't deserve any stars.

Dreamweaver MX Templates is the only book on the market that cover the complexity of the new MX template system. This book is codecentric and it has some pretty advanced concepts that might be difficult for a beginner in Dreamweaver.

There are some answers in this book to some questions that I have had since the upgrade from DW4 and my life working in templates has now become much easier in dealing with DW Templates. Another good point is that the authors have a ready made site with hands on examples that get you working in the concepts that they explain.

I think the book could have been written better, but the content is good and for the most part accurate.

I bought this book based on all of the glamourous reviews it received about 5 months ago, upon its release. When I read the book, I was really skeptical about its integrity and ability to teach the subject. I'm a very experienced web-developer and programmer, so I typically gobble up computer books with a great understanding. This one, to be honest, was really hard for me to follow. I went through the entire book, and yet I still don't feel comfortable using templates. To be honest, in many ways I am more confused. I used to use templates all the time in DW4 and that was all self-taught by simply reading the online Macromedia help. However, since DWMX added a slew of new template features, I decided to buy this based on all the feedback I read here, as well as the official DW message board.

I really think the authors have a hard time communicating their thoughts. They are very technical people, and often technical gurus have a hard time conveying information in a concise, useful manner. There are many steps that are so poorly worded that they have to be read a few times to get a good understanding. Also, I was really disappointed that they didn't cover more on Nested Templates. That was really the main reason I purchased this book, and yet, it was barely covered. Also, they didn't cover ANY template usage with dynamic server languages (ASP, ASP.NET, PHP, etc.), and I think that may have been really helpful.

Here's my big problem with this book. Although I only rated it "2 stars", I would still buy this again. Why? Well, unfortunately, it is the ONLY book that covers Dreamweaver Templates with some form of detail. Other books (such as Dreamweaver MX Bible, Inside Dreamweaver MX) just touch on templates. To make matters worse, you can't rely on Macromedia's help because it is full of errors (some have been fixed), and is also incomplete and confusing.

So, unfortunately, if you can put with the long-winded explanations and need to know templates, then I would recommend this book. It is the only book of its kind. Obviously, these writers were paid by the page, because this could have been written much better in about 20 pages.

I bought this book with some hesitation, but decided to give it a shot. I really want to learn more about templates, and be able to use them on future sites. What a big dissapointment!! I received the book today and just finished reading the majority of the book.

I followed the examples, did the exercises, but to not much avail. The book makes vague references such as see previous chapters, when refering to instructions such as "spawning child pages." Rather difficult to understand!! Perhaps I will give it another try, but for now, I am going back to Dreamweaver 4 and the previous versions of templates.

Definately not recommended!!

First off, this book is not for someone who doesn't already know how to use templates. See previous comments by readers concerning "spawn child pages" which is a vague term not used anywhere else relating to dreamweaver except in this book. What they mean to say is "open as new from template." It took me many many hours to discover this discrepancy.

The main problem with this book is that it goes through 150 pages of explaination without any examples. When they hit you with the actual hands on templates tutorial at page 151, they assume you digested the previous 150 pages and give you ZERO meaningful direction back to the relevant topics being demonstrated. The benevolent authors feel that "use methods described in earlier chapters" is enough direction for their readers, which is absolutely ridiculous.

In frustration, i began searching the web and found an excellent tutorial on pattysite.com about creating nested templates that was infinitely more valuable than this book for getting started with templates. it explained the overall structure of templates in a very concise manner.

After working through the pattysite nested templates tutorial, the book was a somewhat useful guide to the inner workings of dreamweaver templates. Also to be fair, the authors are fairly active on the dreamweaver newsgroups and are readily available for grilling / answering questions. (they will be hearing from me shortly)

So summarizing my rant above, buy this book if you already use templates and want to learn some new tricks, skip it if you don't. This book could easily be reduced to half its size, but as we all know, that doesn't sell very many books. The common logic is that the heft of a manual is directly proportional its value...

I bought this book for an Intro to Dreamweaver CS3 type class and found this to be a throughly helpful text. Its examples were great, well thought out and easy to follow. I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to start out learning Dreamweaver.

The author gives you a good workout in practicing many of the common tasks that you will need in using Dreamweaver. All the exercises work just the way he describes in the book (as is not always the case). He does not thoroughly explain WHY you need to do these tasks, but he goes a long way to making the program approachable, at least. I found that I also needed more knowledge of XHTML (I used XHTML Essential Training by William Weinman) and an actual Dreamweaver training class to bring it all into focus. Dreamweaver is more difficult than I expected, and I am very experienced with the other Adobe products.

I read many reviews of many books before I bought this one. This was a great choice. The exercises provide hands-on practice to see how elements of the program work rather than just reading about them. It doesn't go into great detail explaining the theory behind the workings - there are plenty of other books for that, ie. the Dreamweaver Bible. Everything is presented in a straightforward manner. Great for a beginner, like me. This isn't a book for someone who is already a seasoned web designer. It is meant to get the novice up and running with the program. It also has additional training videos on the CD and a 24hr access to Lynda.com - a great site for finding training of all sorts.

I was compelled to buy this book because I am taking a Dreamweaver course at the local community college. We're most of the way through it now, and I've learned a lot, and feel pretty comfortable using dreamweaver now. For the class I'm taking the instructor pretty much just has us read each chapter of the book, follow along with the exercises in the book, then do little projects from what we learn. The point is though, the learning that we're doing is like 90% from reading the book, and if you want to cut to the chase and not bother with a class like mine, just picking up this book is a pretty nice option.

One other option that you might consider instead of this book, check out the video training by this same author. I've watched enough of it to know that it's pretty darn good, and it covers the same material that the book does. I think watching the video is in some ways a nicer, easier, more visual way to learn, but the advantage of having the book is that it also serves as a decent reference once you've been through it. Something to consider... but both are really good.

This book makes Dreamweaver very clear, and when I have a question, it is always answered in the next sentence. It is so clear and easy to understand. It has a cd in the back with excercises in it for every chapter. Then the illustion in the chapter will show you how it is supposed to look....just like a text book!! Very well written and easy to follow. I have computer experience but not much with web design, so I am basically a beginner. Thanks.