Authoring Books

You don't have to be a professional programmer to produce an accessible, acceptable web site using Dreamweaver 8: all that's required is a working knowledge of the program and Rachel Andrew's BUILD YOUR OWN STANDARDS COMPLIANT WEBSITE USING DREAMWEAVER 8. It's a step-by-step guide which begins with setting preferences and proceeds through the basics of accessibility, navigation links and styling, working with Dreamweaver's CSS panel, and more. One might anticipate a complex guide - but BUILD YOUR OWN STANDARDS COMPLIANT WEBSITE is easy to use, whether you're reading cover-to-cover or hopping about for a quick fix to a problem.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

Since I've purchased other books by Rachel Andrew and have concluded that they are excellent 'help' books for beginners to advanced site builders, I thought I'd try this one out also. It's nice because it guides you pertinent to web standards using CSS, Xhtml and more within Dreamweaver.
The book is easy to understand and guides you step by step.

It's refreshing to construct a site using Dreamweaver and standards as they are, without an equal amount of hacks and tricks to kludge the site into cross browser compatibility. Rachel Andrew's straightforward and step by step guide shows how to do it right and in the right order.

Rachel spends about the first third of the book getting me up to speed on Web Standards and XHTML, and rightly so. This part of the book gives me the "whys" behind my choices of foundational coding including "strict" or "transitional" and "ems" or "points". It is one of the clearest and easiest to read treatment of Standards, Accessibility, and XHTML that I've ever seen.

The project site for the tutorial is straightforward and easy to use. It included common elements like header, navigation, and main content area so the concepts are easy to apply right away to my real world projects.

I enjoyed following Rachel's suggested workflow. Create a semantic document that includes all the features my site will need. Then organize it into content blocks that make sense. Then position them. My workflow routine has been the other way 'round: make the structure, then plug in the content. It seems like a content to design workflow will help avoid distracting elements that could be unnecessary.

Expert css coders may find this book too basic, but it's a must have for css or Dreamweaver 8 beginners and those transitioning from using tables for layouts. This book helped me get my ducks in a row and my priorities straight.

Rachel is not totally reliant on Dreamweaver 8 as a stand-alone to get my job done. When a third party application makes sense, she has no qualms about integrating it the right way. Even though she does not take me all the way through making a working form, she got me a lot further than other tutorial books. She even directed me to samples of Perl/CGI, ASP, and PHP scripts that come with directions on how to implement them on my own server. Offering specific resources for further study is a great way to soften the blow of "...is outside the scope of this book."

The chapter on alternate style sheets is a keeper also. She got me to think through the different user needs as well as media types and create specific css documents to address them.

Build Your Own Standards Compliant Website is a tutorial book that got me engaged enough to stop and think about web design from several different levels: workflow, coding, use of third party applications, and scripts. It did a great job of educating me for confident use of css and Dreamweaver 8.

This book may be helpful if you are working alone to design a small site. If you want to know how to set up and use a test server, download to test server vs. remote server, use check-in/check-out, use cloaking (re Dreamweaver, not the same as cloaking re search engines), or almost any other Dreamweaver 8 site management functionality... well, that was the information I needed and it isn't in this book.

Are you a Dreamweaver novice or a more experienced user? If you are, then this book is for you! Author Rachel Andrew, has written an outstanding book that will help you expand your knowledge and learn how to use Dreamweaver 8 to create sites that are accessible, standards compliant, and use CSS for layout.

Andrew, begins by taking a look at Web standards: what they are, why they're important, and who they're designed to help. Then, she shows you how to develop your site--thinking specifically about the layout and the structure of the site, and setting up your tools so you're ready to get started. The author continues by discussing XHTML, clarifying how it differs from HTML, and how you can work with it in Dreamweaver 8. In addition, she walks you through the process of using Dreamweaver 8 to create a document that validates as XHTML. The author also explores Dreamweaver 8's Cascading Style Sheets tools. Then, the author shows you how to use Dreamweaver 8's powerful CSS tools to create a style sheet for your document. Next, she provides some more information on the use of tools to help you create accessible Websites, discusses the process of validating documents for accessibility, and considers the ways in which users' differing needs can be met through good design. Next, the author shows you how to create a page design that you can use as a template for any internal pages that are developed for the project. Then, she briefly describes how to create a form using a variety of the accessibility features that Dreamweaver 8 offers. Finally, she looks at the ways in which you can utilize the power of CSS to provide visitors a variety of alternate style sheets with which to use the site.

After reading this excellent book, you'll learn how to use Dreamweaver 8 the right way. In other words, this book will help you do all of this without compromising accessibility or standards compliance.

Aside from the obvious, that it has nothing whatsoever to do with THE Bible, it's quite dry and un-informing. I'm unable to get much from the book; other than "history of the web" type stuff. Buy at your own risk.

This book, while daunting in size, is very accessible and contains everything you need to know about Dreamweaver CS3. I'm a designer, comfortable coding CSS/HTML but pretty green when it comes to things like XML and Spry. Other Dreamweaver books I looked at didn't have anything I didn't already know...so I knew they were lacking in a big way. This book takes you through every nook and cranny and when compared to others its astounding how glaring their shortcomings are and much more is in here. While you probably won't lay in bed reading this giant book it is by far the best and only book to consider for Dreamweaver. For me its serving as a springboard to learn other technologies/languages, so I'd have to say you'll learn a lot even beyond Dreamweaver. Covers the subject matter thoroughly and teaches you so much more...they didn't have to bother writing any other Dreamweaver books. This is the one.

I ordered this book for it's coverage of the new Spry Ajax features of Dreamweaver CS3. Having used the three previous versions of DW for nearly 10 years, I was not looking for an introduction to DW, but more for an encyclopedic reference to look up and deal with specific situations and coverage of new features. So far I have found the Bible to be very good for these purposes. Subjects are easy to find using the table of contents and index and, once found, topic coverage is clear and full of usage/code examples.

As I said, I am far from being a DW newbie who needs introduction to the basics of the software so I have not spent much time in the introductory chapters of the book. I have, however, loaned the book to a co-worker who is new to the product. She indicated that the Bible author's writing style and liberal use of figures and examples made the content easy to understand and she feels that her DW expertise has been pumped up dramatically by her exposure to this book.

This is a good, well-organized resource both for the experienced developer and the web development novice.

Just speaking from one who does not build websites for a living. I purchased Dreamweaver to build our own company websites. We have used primarily Frontpage in the past for our basic websites, despite it's obvious limitations. So obviously there is a steep learning curve towards learning Dreamweaver. We are fairly competent with computers, but the biggest problem we have with this book is that it is so wordy. This book is over one thousand pages long, and the first one hundred pages do little more than describe Dreamweaver's features and attributes, without getting into any of the meat of how to actually run the software. Time is a limited commodity for us, and we don't need to wade through a thousand page book to find our answers.
I would agree that this is an excellent reference book, and I would recomend purchasing it to improve your web design capabilities, once you're already familiar with Dreamweaver. But I would prefer to see the big picture first. That is, I would rather learn the basics first, on how to run Dreamweaver, then learn about all of it's intricacies later.
So I would recomend this book as the second Dreamweaver book to read, if you are new to Dreamweaver. The first one should be more basic and more to the point.

I started CS3 using the all-in-one CS3 book for Dummies. It was a very good overview of the entire suite that helped get me going, but it wasn't long before I needed more detail. That's where this Bible comes in. I haven't read it cover-to-cover yet, but the individual sections provide the additional detail to take the frustration out of new tasks. I find this much more useful than the on-line Adobe articles. It would be nicer if the illustrations were in color, but that would also make the book much more expensive, so it's not a bad tradeoff.

The main strength of this book is it's broad coverage. Every possibility it's considered chapter by chapter, games, rich media, sound, object oriented programming, etc. I found extremely useful the optimizing sizes and sounds chapters, and just that it's worth the price. However, be aware this is not a "how to" book. It's intended for people with experience in Flash. If you're a beginner, you'll face a lot of technical language, specially in the action script part. The book won't give you major explanations about it, 'cause you're supposed to be experienced enough to understand what's going on.

Since this book describes Flash 5 projects only, it's a bit outdated. This factor in particular dissapointed me, considering the price. Other similar books have full coverage of Flash 8 features for the same price. The irony is, if you're a rookie, this book it's not for you, and if you're and experienced user, probably you already know all the secrets included in the book.

This book is tremendous compendium for FLASH afficionados. I already had a strong background with experience using and developing in FLASH. But to see the ideas, code and they way it was architected by Smashing Ideas and other experts is really great.

Also, I found it very inspirational to read the thoughts of industry marvels like Jason Alan Snyder and Glenn Thomas who have been incredibly innovative with their creative use of FLASH in the areas of advertising and marketing.

I highly reccomend this title to anyone who wants to gain additional insight from the best and brightest the industry has to offer.

I would have to say that there are some nice tid bits of flash wisdom spread through out this book. Not sure if that's worth the price of the book!

Also, not really a teaching tool about flash, more of a teaching tool about how Smashing Ideas in Seattle do things!

The best thing about this book is Chapter 2, "Optimizing, Loading, and Playback". The other books that I have read about flash don't even touch on this issue. It was worth the price of the book. Learning how to use the movie report option in flash, and how to properly bring in images for use from Illustrator has DRASTICALLY reduced my file sizes. My bitmap files look 20 times better, and are WAAAAaY smaller.

The animation chapter was also good. That chapter also had cool optimization techniques, like the modify>optimize pallate that I had never used before. Using it on all my drawn symbols reduced my file size by about 30 percent, and the drawings didn't look any different.

This book has a lot of information in it, I think it definately has something for everyone, especially if you are new to flash. I think this book gave me the basics on just about everything. It was a decent read,and the book is really nice to look at with TONS of color pictures, and I like that Smashing Ideas Robot Guy.

The Sound chapter is also really good, especially for non-sound people like myself. I picked up a lot of new techniques here that I had no clue about.

I have definately referred to the optimization techniques in this book in every flash project I've done since. I do recommend picking up this book if only for the drastic reduction in file sizes you will experience after reading it.

Flash Studio Secrets was insightful but expensive. It's one of those books that are nice to have if you have the money, but enhances books already in your collection. It would not be useful being your only Flash book. The studio/business point of view and analysis of projects were very good, but I think the books suffers from a "Jack of all trades mentality" Then again, maybe that was their target audience for people buying the book. If you want to specialize on just web design, focus just on cartooning or focus on actionscript/gaming, buy another book. If you were looking for a good overview and another perspective to add to your library, this book would be ok.

I found the chapter on sound and programming a good read. Unfortunately there are a few typo's which annoy and the source code promised for the chess game in chapter four is not included on their website. I emailed them for the working version of the chess game they talk about, but am yet to receive an answer. The chapters on edutainment and marketing are also an interesting read. Furthermore, there are some good tricks and ideas mentioned throughout.

This is an intermediate book. This book will generate ideas and let you look at things regarding Flash in a different perspective. Don't buy this book if you're looking to learn how to use the program. This book will give you ideas on how to improve on what you already know and improve your workflow.

I just got this book after reading "learn dreamweaver mx in 24 hrs" and to compare the two books is like comparing apples and oranges. This book was nothing in comparison. I couldn't even finish reading it. Save your money, this book doesn't live up to the reader reviews or even its own editorial reviews. The book doesn't deserve the high rating it has gotten. That rating was one of the main reasons I chose the book and I found it very misleading.

So many computer books seem to be written without any concern for reader. Easily understood detail seems to be lacking. Gaining the knowledge sought typically requires re-reading a chapter or topic many times, then experimenting with pieces of information to garner how the item really works.

Not this one.

Mr. Meadhra has provided a clear, concise presentation of the Dreamweaver MX product without the 'tech manual ' approach . Written in non-geek, understandable English, it easily accomplishes the goals of providing a MX quick start for the novice and intermediate user, and additionally, a product features and implementation tool for the advanced user.

From chapter one, then through the entire book, the material is covered in a logical, easy-to-understand manner. The sequence of material presentation follows the same steps the web page developer must use to get a project up and running. Chapters are laced with thoughtful illustrations providing a visual re-enforcement of subject being discussed.

Chapter organization is one of the items clearly planned. Each chapter begins with a one or two paragraph overview of the topic. This is followed by a couple of paragraphs explaining of the concepts behind the topic. (This point seems to always be missed in other writings). Then the topic is covered in detail.

Sidebars are used to provide HowTO, Tips, and Cautions. An absolutely great idea that helps avoid the dreaded 'I did what the book said but it doesn't work' syndrome. These items are highlighted throughout the book and are clearly presented.

One can tell Mr. Meadhra is a web site developer, he has all the bases covered.

So many computer books seem to be written without any concern for reader. Easily understood detail seems to be lacking. Gaining the knowledge sought typically requires re-reading a chapter or topic many times, then experimenting with pieces of information to garner how the item really works.

Not this one.

Mr. Meadhra has provided a clear, concise presentation of the Dreamweaver MX product without the 'tech manual ' approach . Written in non-geek, understandable English, it easily accomplishes the goals of providing a MX quick start for the novice and intermediate user, and additionally, a product features and implementation tool for the advanced user.

From chapter one, then through the entire book, the material is covered in a logical, easy-to-understand manner. The sequence of material presentation follows the same steps the web page developer must use to get a project up and running. Chapters are laced with thoughtful illustrations providing a visual re-enforcement of subject being discussed.

Chapter organization is one of the items clearly planned. Each chapter begins with a one or two paragraph overview of the topic. This is followed by a couple of paragraphs explaining of the concepts behind the topic. (This point seems to always be missed in other writings). Then the topic is covered in detail.

Sidebars are used to provide HowTO, Tips, and Cautions. An absolutely great idea that helps avoid the dreaded 'I did what the book said but it doesn't work' syndrome. These items are highlighted throughout the book and are clearly presented.

One can tell Mr. Meadhra is a web site developer, he has all the bases covered.

This Meadhra book is written in a clear style that is easy to follow and is especially usefull for those of us who have a life and aren't interested in an encyclopedia that covers every nuance of machine code.

Simply put, this is a well written, easy to follow, informative and yet easy to understand guide to Dreamweaver MX. The author does a great job of conveying his message in a clear and concise manner. Just an all around great guide and actually fun to read. Highly recommend this to anyone starting out using Dreamweaver MX.

First there are lots of code snippets right in the text,
which makes it rather easy to follow things when you don't
have a Zope box next to you. Sometimes they are a bit too
in-depth (like the listing of the SQLLevers in the ZPatterns
example) but most time they are selected wisely.

I found a lot of different topics explained (from Zope
for Newbiews, CMS, lots of 3rd Party Products, System Administration,
ZEO) which all bring enough knowledge to you, to start working with
them right after reading. (Or after downloading from the online
website that comes with the book.)

The Chapter (actually there are 3) about ZPatterns is actually
the most important to me, because it helped me understanding
this complex topic in a couple of days.

This book is a big must-read for all people trying to gain "Zope-Zen"!

I've got copies of the Zope Book and Zope Web Construction Kit and this book is better than the other two, but you really have to reference the website... for updates and errata for the source code.

That said - the examples in the book are short and clear and the authors _do_ seem to update the site and reply to emails when errors are found.

This is the _only_ Zope book I'd recommend.

This is a good intro to Zope. If you have a free weekend and want to get to know Zope, this would be a very fine way to do it. Zope is amazingly expandable, and that is one of the things that this book points out & demonstrates with several helpful examples. I was amazed at how much the authors were able to pack into the book & pleased with the way they used products to demonstrate important features of Zope.

Because Zope is so expandable and versatile, however, they had to leave some things out. A topic that could have used a little more coverage (or maybe a lot, maybe a seperate book?) is database integration. It's a big topic, though, so I guess it makes sense that it isn't fully fleshed out.

Overall, I'd recommend this book to anyone who (like me) is still getting to know Zope. It's very clearly written and well laid out. Kudos to the authors and publisher.

db

This book is both outdated (it discusses extensively Zope extensions that are no longer supported) and incoherent (it is
just a collection of unrelated example projects only loosely
tied together by the common theme of managing some content on a
web site). You're better off with the Zope Bible (for Zope) and the Content Management Bible (for CM issues generally). However,
there are a few useful things in it so if you can get it for
$5-10 as a remaindered book, go for it.

This book tries to cover slightly different ground than "how to start using Zope to develop web sites." If you're looking for a good general introduction to Zope, I'd look at either Beehive's The Book of Zope, or the Zope Book (the online edition at zope.org; the printed version is quite out-of-date).

This book is basically a walkthrough of several products for Zope (the CMF, ZPatterns, ZUBB, etc.) I doubt you'll find that you've learned much about how to use Zope or how to develop for it, rather than a thin bit about how to apply these products.

I also found that this book felt rather hastily put-together, without much continuity between chapters.

The only reason I'd recommend this book is if you're looking to learn about ZPatterns, and chances are, you aren't.

Whereas, this is NOT the book to use to teach you Dreamweaver, it is a good reference book. Joseph Lowery is a recognized expert with Macromedia Products and knows his stuff.

This is an excellent book for anyone who has never built a website but wants a complete approach to getting one up and running. But this book won't get you up and running with a whiz-bang, full multimedia website quickly. Instead, it will walk you through all the features of Dreamweaver and have you try out each one step-by-step. Flipping around the book helped me to learn the features I wanted to learn.

There is a Quickstart section that's supposed to get you up and running fast, but I found this section to be too deep too soon for what I wanted. I needed about 3 weeks of reading and practice before I could build something that was useful (I'm building an Intranet for the company I work at), and I will probably need another 2-3 months with this book before I can make my site do what I want it to do. Nonethelss, I have received a lot of compliments for what I now have.

I think that after getting through this book (in the 2-3 months) I will be "really competent". Becomming an expert will take more time. But that's the way it is with any software book. Nobody becomes an programming or website expert quickly from a book. Just practice!

There is also a full-featured 30-day trial of Dreamweaver on the CD, a definate plus.

Start off knowing nothing about web design and a few days later know it all! This book is packed full of easy-to-understand examples and powerful hints and tips. I've read a lot of computer-related books in my day and I've never seen a book layed out any better. It's so easy to comprehend and follow. And the best part is....you'll have a FUN time learning unlike a lot of other software programs.

This book tries to be all things to all people and as such it includes basic stuff and quite advanced stuff. There's basic info about HTML (ie what's a

tag) which I skipped straight over but which a beginner would find useful (although there's plenty of other books that cover this material). For the more advanced user there's some great info on how to make your own Dreamweaver extensions, cross-browser compatibility issues, and incorporating the Beatnik plug-in into your pages to make interesting sound effects.

The accompanying CD-ROM is full of useful Dreamweaver extensions (although you could have downloaded these from various websites), as well as trial versions of Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash. Also included is the complete text of the book in PDF format.

I got this book after positive reviews on this website. It was my first foray into web design. Boy, did Lowery's approach get me off on the wrong foot.

Firstly, the writing is appalling. Here's are a few example (at random):

"The term cascading describes the capability of a local style to override a general style"

"Although you can design the most beautiful, compelling image possible in your graphics program, if it's intended for the Internet, you need to view it in a Web page."

"Checkboxes enable an option to be selected or deselected, so the only information that a function needs from a checkbox is whether it has been selected."

Argh! Why use 5 words when 15 will do? I also get the impression that Lowery is paraphrasing the Macromedia Tech guides. And his book is riddled with errors. Consider this howler:

"For instance, rather than just specifying Palatino - a sans serif font common on PC's but relatively unknown on the Mac - you could insert a tag such as the following ..."

Not only is Palatino a *serif* typeface, it has been included as a system Macintosh font since the 1980's - it's a default install on every Macintosh sold! I emailed Lowery about this, and to his credit he replied within 24 hours. His response?

"Okay - how about I change it to Verdana next time ;)"

Joseph, I think you're missing the point.

In his defence, the tone is paternal and he seems to be a well-meaning buffoon. But I've found the book terribly confusing and, after shelling out £40 for the doorstop, ended up getting most of my Dreamweaver help from the web.

I find it incredible that such a third rate manual gets published, let alone gets a high customer ranking. Steer clear, you can do better.

I actually bought this book because of the 1 star comments saying this book spent too much time on Servers and Databases. Well Hey, those subjects are for the big boys who actually make 6 figures a year.

I am an advanced programmer, but fairly new to UltraDev - i create web applications where the Html/JSP/ASP side is just half of the picture and this book has helped in linking the two.

BUT, i did find that the author(s) tried to stuff too much into the book to make it to 300 pages - i already know how to do the basic stuff in Dream Weaver - bring on the advanced stuff. Half of it did seem to be copied from the Utradev tutorial help!

This is NOT a particularly fat book which is merciful. I was actually able to read it cover-to-cover and follow the author's logic and directions (as they suggest), and really feel like I learned how to use UltraDev. I found the book to be well-thought out. The UltraDev tutorial, for example, is good but it over-explains every step. This book starts off detailed and then as you learn it assumes you know more and doesn't waste your time telling you the most basic stuff again and again when stepping you though exercises. Even so, the authors don't leave out any important details. Every exercise worked for me. I was never left saying, "Hugh?"

The reviewer below that said that this book reads like it was written by people who have experience teaching others was right on.

My only complaint is relatively minor but worth noting: The CD did not have the tables used for the exercises in enough different formats. Everything is in Access 2000 which I don't have. There are a few tables that are in Excel format, which was helpful because I could then import them into Access 97. But oddly enough the complete final table with all the data, that is used in exercises throughout the book was NOT in Excel format. This may have been a CD 'typo'. This was an inconvenience because I had to have someone with Access 2000 save the file down for me. After that it worked fine. The book itself is nicely done.

Just look at the review by jsonterre1... I agree with him 100%
This is the worst money ever spent on a book. I am currently going through exercises that often don't seem to work. Very frustrating when you're actually expecting to learn from the book you have purchased. This book is more complicated than UltraDev itself. I don't recommend this book to anyone.

At 319 pages, a rarity in computer books, the book manages to cover a lot of ground about building dynamic Web pages with Macromedia's Dreamweaver UltraDev4 by using Active Server Pages, though not in great detail in any part. The authors sate in their introduction that the "goal of this books is to provide the reader with foundation skills that can be combined as needed."

If you already know how to use Dreamweaver (which the authors assume you do), and if you already took a class, or played around a bit with Microsoft Access, this book can help you take your skills to a new level by helping you to start learning how to combine them.

Discussing databases and recordsets may seem superfluous to those who can't wait to get on with the designing the Web pages themselves. But, as someone who earns part of my living by cleaning up badly built databases in the first place, I am the first to appreciate a book that states the obvious when it comes to creating a database. So, even if you think you know how to build a database, I recommend you glance through this section. It will save you time and make your code leaner when you tget to wworking with your data on the Web page with UltraDev, which has its own limitations!

That said, I find it strange that the book, which concentrates on using Microsoft's Active Server Pages server model for building dynamic Web pages, displays 99 percent of its examples in a Mac environment. And yet, this may even turn out to be one of those bugs that is really a feature: let Mac users know that they, too, can build data-driven pages with Dreamweaver UltraDev 4, provided they have access to a server, which the authors discuss in adequate detail early in the book.

In general, I tend to buy several how-to computer books that deal with the same subject, using parts of one over parts of others when I learn ... I found that I frequently returned to consult this book on some detail as I was learning, precisely beacuse it keeps things fundamental, and, therefore, widely adaptable for different situations.

I bought this book based on the reviews but after spending [item price] and seeing that the first 80 pages had nothing to do with UltraDev 4 at all and only on servers, databeses and languages I guess I can say it didn't start off very well. If i wanted to learn about what a database, server or other languages are then I would buy a book based on that.

Not only was there a lot of unessesary information in the book but I bought the book to learn "Dreamweaver Ultra Dev 4" and the book played all the components off that were in "Dreamweaver" to be learned from a "Dreamweaver" book and only covered things that pertained to UltraDev 4. Well I have Macromedia Dreamweaver Ultra Dev 4 and I don't have Dreamweaver itself... When I buy a book that says "Dreamweaver UltraDev 4" on it I expect that it will cover everything that is in the Dreamweaver UltrDev 4 program.

They don't tell you that in any of these reviews...

Who wrote these anyway? Friends, family and publishers...

The book has 306 pages of content and I think only 100 pages are usefull.

Sorry go with another book.

Excellent book to learn about all the new features of Dreamweaver CS3. I had the MX 2004 version but just upgraded. The changes are phenomenal. Excellent book in a great line of Sam's books.

I have read quite a few Dreamweaver books and this one by far is the easiest to follow. It has broken down steps in a way that gets straight to the point of what you need to do to build a site.

The back of this book, which arrived today, says "User Level: Beginning" and they are right. Wish Amazon's description of the book would have said that. I can see why the book's style would appeal to beginners, but with much Front Page experience, I needed at least an intermediate text. Less on the basics (like relative vs. absolute paths)and much more on style sheets, tables, etc. Also missing (not even in the Index) was any mention of "Contribute" a new Adobe tool designed to be used by non-programmers to maintain Dreamweaver-built websites.

So the book goes back and I will order something tougher.

I found this book to be very helpful and informative. I'm new to Dreamweaver CS-3 and I found that this book really covers the basics of Dreamweaver and Web design and gets into some of the more advanced features. After reading this book I've really gotten a grasp of Dreamweaver. I find that it is especially a good resource in conjunction with the online seminars from Adobe.

Sam's Teach yourself Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 in 24 hours, is a comprehensive book that covers virtually everything you will need to know about the program. I initially chose this book because I had limited experience with Dreamweaver and wanted to be able to learn the fundamentals very quickly. One quick note about the titles of these books. Sam's Teach Yourself in 24 hours series is a bit misleading in the sense that it doesn't actually mean you could pick up the book one night and be an expert the next. O.K. well sort of...The Sam's Teach Yourself in 24 hours series of books are composed of 24, one-hour lessons that cumulatively help the user to learn a particular software program.

If you don't like learning theory or "why" something works then Sam's Teach Yourself Dreamweaver CS3 in 24 hours may not be the best kind of book for you. It is not the kind of book you can peruse on the weekend or take on a trip to help ramp up your skills. As an inexperienced Dreamweaver user, I found that I couldn't just go to the table of contents and select a section that sounded interesting. I felt like I had to start at the beginning and work my way through each chapter.

I am a Dreamweaver novice but an intermediate user of html, xhtml, and css so the beginning of this book was not as useful for me as say someone with no experience at all. This book would probably best suit someone without any web development experience at all. A small knowledge is certainly not detrimental but it forced me to skim the beginning and I felt myself wanted to "do" something.

This book doesn't have as many practice exercises as I would prefer. If you are someone who enjoys an included CD/DVD or at least a website with practice files then this book may not be the best for you. The book does suggest that you learn some fundamentals of web design/development by opening a pre-existing website. This task would certainly be helpful for the novice and is a good way to learn many CS3 features.

As someone who has used these type of training manual books before I felt that the greatest assets that this book had several strengths including: 1) Comprehensive and Detailed Explanations, 2) A good amount of screen shots, 3) Content Is Well Organized.

The weaknesses of this particular book include: 1) It is entirely black and white, 2) It is much too comprehensive for an intermediate user, 3) lacks an accompanying exercise files.

I would recommend this book to someone with absolutely NO web design, web development, or Dreamweaver experience. I would also recommend they begin on page 1 and work their way through incrementally as the book is intended. Give yourself 24 Days and do a one hour lesson a day. That would be a great way to get through each of the lessons and thoroughly learn Dreamweaver CS3.

Nate

This book was exactly what I was looking for--chapter eight alone was worth the cost of the book. A word to the wise: rather than assuming its contents from the title alone, read chapter one thoroughly to ensure that this book is right for you.

I'm short of superlatives for this book or more generally for the work of Ben Fry.

In my line of work, how people think of graphs is very much influenced by what is possible to do in Excel without changing the default settings too much.
Enter Processing, a data visualization-oriented language, which makes it easy to create custom visualizations, tailored for the problem you want to address. There is a growing community around Processing and a number of truly incredible graphs that have been created with just a few lines of code. Ben Fry's own work, which ranges from simplistic to very sophisticated, is nothing short of mind-blowing. Yet this book demystifies this and make it all look accessible.

It opens great perspectives for anyone interested in expressing their data graphically. Still, the title is misleading.

This is not a book about, say, editorial rules by which one should construct a visualization. It is not an abstract book that offers generic advice that can be used in whatever environment. For that kind of book, pick Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten or The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition - books which are consistent with Fry's approach, by the way. "Visualizing Data" is really a practical cookbook that will introduce you to Processing. It offers methodological insights, but which are mostly relevant in the Processing environment.

That being said, I highly recommend this book and keeping a close tab on [..]

Ben Fry hits the mark!

The author jumps right into describing the process in Chapter 1, "The Seven Stages of Visualizing Data."
He elaborates each of the stages with illustrations and examples.

In chapter 2, "Getting Started with Processing," Ben introduces a software tool (named Processing) that's available for download: www.processing.org/download.

From the site: "Processing is an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. It evolved from ideas explored in the Aesthetics and Computation Group at the MIT Media Lab."

And the remainder of the title details the various stages of visualizing data with sample code you can use to develop your own visualizations!

Based on the title and publisher's writeup I was expecting the book to provide in-depth coverage of various visual metaphors for understanding and manipulating data, such as "Designing Interfaces" by Tidwell, another O'Reilly book that I am very pleased with.

Unfortunately it would be more appropriate if the title (Visualizing Dta) and sub-title (Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment) were switched. This book is primarily a tutorial on using the Processing Environment (http://processing.org), showing you how to create various interactive charts and composed primarily of code examples.

In addition, the visualizations presented in the book are far from aesthetically pleasing. The Processing Environment has the capability to create visualizations that are not only functional, but beautiful as well. You can find a collection of visualizations at http://www.visualcomplexity.com, many of which were created with the Processing Environment.

In summary I am granting a 2-star rating because the book does not deliver the expected coverage of data visualization design and even in its explanation of the Processing Environment does not provide exemplary visualizations.

'Visualizing Data' is a book that is supposed to discuss how data is presented, sorted, stored and examined. Instead what we get is a 350+ page book that is jumbled with lots of code samples (why) and a small subset of data that is actually visualized. This is a really niche topic that I thought would be interesting to examine as I opened the book cover but thumbing through I saw few pictures (although there are a few in here that are good) and lots of java code. While it's interesting to see how data is outputted code-wise, from the book title I felt this would be more of a design discussion for the reader.

I can't recommend this book. There is too much code, too much content, and the code that is contained within is all Java. I didn't get much out of it and I feel that if less code and more pictures were added the end result would have been much more solid.

** NOT RECOMMENDED

Having purchased Dreamweaver and being new to web design it made perfect sense to me to get a guide book to help me use it. The Dreamweaver CS3 for Dummies is very easy to use, well set out, and much more convenient than the electronic help files and tutorials that come with the software. Dreamweaver CS3 for Dummies is a great resource to turn to again and again as you learn more and more each time you go back to it.

As had another reviewer above, I had used an older version of FrontPage years ago before diving into Dreamweaver CS3 recently. I found this book very helpful. The exercises are clear and map well to what the software actually looks like. The author's web site is very helpful as well. What was most satisfying, however, was when I stubbed my toe trying to solve a problem, finding an answer neither in the book nor on the web site. I emailed the author. To my amazement and delight, she emailed back within several days with a clear solution and pointers to the section of her book that covered what I needed. Now *that" is responsiveness.

This is an excellent introduction to Dreamweaver CS3 for people who are familiar with web technologies but who have never worked with Dreamweaver. It covers the basics quickly and even goes into a number of best pratices and advanced topics. For example, it covers css positioning and layout as a more modern alternative to using tables. This makes it easier to design for alternate device browsers like cell phones or PDAs. It also has chapters on dynamic, data base driven, web sites.

If you know web technologies, this book can get you up to speed in Dreamweaver CS3 in a few days.

I'm no dummy but sometimes felt like one reading this book. The name suggests that it is for someone with no experience setting up a website. That's me. But it sometimes assumes more knowlege than I have. There is a difference between ignorance and stupidity. I'm ignorant of many things - but capable of learning. Perhaps more practical examples would have helped. As a beginners book, there were too many gaps that left me confused, too much use of terminology I didn't know -and should not have been expected to know at various points. This isn't, by any means a bad book. Just not for dummies.

It was my first Dreamweaver book and I have to say that I learn some concepts but I found severals errors in the book.

For example, CSS part is not well explained and you will never know how to include tags inside a container. I read several times and for me It was impossible. I think it is the most important concept in Dreamweaver and it is not well explained.

I also found errors when you try to follow the exercises. The main window is not explained properly and the complex concpets are not explained.

From my point of view, it is a good book to start but there are things that you will reviewed.