Authoring Books

Could have a bigger variety of examples, not only products and clients. There are some intellectuals who use the web too. It left me with questions about certain matters that could be answered by the book easily.

Having worked with Dreamweaver since version 2, I went out looking for something to get me beyond the basics that every tutorial covers. I saw "Advanced" and thought, ah-hah! I've found it!

Nope. The topics it covers are about as in-depth as the Dreamweaver manual (which, of course, is free with your copy of Dreamweaver). If you are looking for how to create your own objects or behaviors, or how to really take advantage of the server scripting capabilities, this isn't your book.

What it does cover, it covers clearly, so if you are just starting out with Dreamweaver, don't pass by the book based on its title. By the time you are ready for advanced, you won't need it.

The word "Advanced" in the title may be a little misleading, but that's the worst thing I can say about this book. I am, by trade, a system administrator who wants to dabble in web frontends for databases. I think that makes me a beginner. Specifically, I have a simple Excel spreadsheet I've converted to a simple SQL 2000 database, and I want a simple frontend to update and query its records. Oddly to me, I could not find any direction from any of the Dreamweaver MX books with "Fundamentals" or "For Beginners" or "Introducing" in the titles. Some might say database connections is an advanced feature of MX, but I don't think so. Before I read this book, I didn't even know what ASP or VBScript was, really. The beginning of the book explains the different web technologies AND database technologies (wish I had used PHP and MySQL). Now I know the difference between JSP and Java and Javascript. After that introduction, they walk you through connecting to your database and setting up dynamic forms. It's all making sense now. I don't think you could depend on this book stand-alone without good ASP, HTML and SQL references, but it has been the best resource in my collection so far.

Making DVDs is a well-rounded, informative handbook. It's easy to read and uses a "learn by doing" approach. By following the book's guidelines and suggestions, anyone can succeed in authoring a DVD project confidently. I think the book is a great value. I have two earlier CD-ROM/CD-R/DVD books by this author. He is well versed in the present state of the evolving DVD technology.

I do video production for a living. I am in the process of upgrading my business/equipment to include the ability to burn DVD's for my clients. This book didn't teach me the steps to accomplish this goal. This book was very general covering video production generalities, case studies, lots of technical jargon. I have a degree in television production, and the technical jargon in this book was WAY over my head. It did suggested some different DVD authoring programs for both a PC and MAC. Chapter 17 was the only chapter that really somewhat covered the differences in DVD-, DVD+, DVD+RW, DVD-RW, DVD-Rom, etc. But most of that chapter was hard to understand with technical terms that weren't really explained. I guess you could go thru the glossary and try to decifer the meanings, but I'd recommend looking for a different book. Out of the 304 pages, I found maybe 30 pages that were useful to me. I think I need one of those books for "dummies".

It took me a while to see the value in "Making DVD's", and at first, I too only found a few pages of details that I thought were the real gold in the text. However, after reading through the different case studies, this is where the real benefit of this book comes in. These are real-world examples of people just like me that had a dream and a vision, and, by their example, I will be better equipped to make my project a success. Now, if you want to know about the latest gizmo to burn DVD's, or the latest format, or the number of henways per femptome, look somewhere else. Buy a magazine for that. If you want to learn how to capture an event correctly and learn from the examples of others that have gone before, this is for you. Consider this a crash coarse in film making from start to finish.

This book attempts to cover topics in Flash, Dreamweaver, and Fireworks all in one book, with huge screenshots taking up every page. As a result, you barely scratch the surface of these complex programs. I am a beginner myself, and already there are things I want to learn that I can't find in this book. Its clearly written for slow college students, and while I'm a college student myself I find this book to be too slow and elementary. I covered almost the whole flash section in about two days. If you are completely new to working with images, video timelines, and web publishing, this book would probably be fine, in fact, perfect for you, as it pays close attention to the beginner's details. However, I've worked with Adobe Photoshop and have done some web publishing before, so the step by step instructions are rather intuitive. Also the examples used throughout the book are incredibly unprofessional and unrealistic for practical use, so you feel like you're learning to draw stick figures and make goofy personal web pages when you're trying to learn to make something professional and marketable.

If you aren't particularly serious about learning these programs and just want to play around with them, and if you don't have any, meaning zero, experience with photo applications and web publishing, buy this book. (You can buy mine if you want. Send me a message.) Otherwise, you'll get through it in about a week and find yourself wondering, now what am I supposed to do with this thing?

Great book for bigginers, takes you to the next level you'll be using Macromedia Suite in no time! did me a lot of good...

This book was our text in a Dreamweaver and Fireworks class I took. It offers a good introduction with hands-on experience. You can download files from the internet to do the exercises. The directions are quite clear and easy to follow. I found the dimensions a bit annoying - too wide to set by the computer on a small desk, but the content served it's purpose. Nice layouts too. Lots of eye candy!

Good illustrations but not that easy for a DVD STudio Pro 'Dummy'. I found that I had to go to the Apple DVD Studio Pro manual from the net to work out what to do. Then, after I had a basic understanding, and a few hours of fiddling on the computer,this book came to life for me and was very useful. Particularly the project workshops.

I've been in a fight w/ Apple and Peachpit over this 'new' version of DVDSP4.
I'm an Apple cert. instructor for this and other ProApps. When I started reading the new book I found the same mistakes from version 3 had been copied over to version 4.

Granted, the new compressor app is great but nowhere does it explain the new features of DVDSP4 like support for external video, VTS editing and the whole HD support. I was told by Apple and Peachpit that this version of the book was intended to be an 'revision' of the old book; however, the general advertising of this book says 'Fully Update' instead of 'Fully Revised'... a bit misleading to the people who thought this version would help instruct students on how to best use the new features. We'll have to wait.

The author of this book starts great, explaining a lot of features of Blend 2, but not deep enough. I was sincerely expecting a lot more. Many features of Blend are not explained and great features as timelines, triggers and resources have less pages that I wanted to read.
The author explains very well, so I can say that the book is very good for a begginner, but not for experts.

I bought this book soon after MS released the Beta 1 of Silverlight 2.
It helped me get started with learning the Expression Blend tool and how to do some basic design. It is not a programmers book nor does it attempt to be one. It is a good introduction on how to get around in Blend so you don't have to figure it out yourself. And along the way the authour makes it enjoyable.

I was very disappointed with this book considering it was used for a college level course. I could see it being more useful to a high school student who likes to follow pictures for every step. Even the most basic things were illustrated. If you want to learn Dreamweaver, this is not the book. If you want to learn web design, this is definitely not the book.

This book is used as a textbook for website development class at my local community college. It is well thought out and leads the student in a logical manner and is not so aggressive that the usual frustration sets in as usual with computer science classes.

I really like this book. I don't write reviews very often, but I was really impressed with this book. It is full color and very clearly written. I wish more technology books were this nice. It is asthetically enjoyable to work with.

I bought this book to try and get a handle on the new features in the product. I found some of the information to be inaccurate (not sure if it was based on a version prior to the version that Microsoft released or if the author was just careless) and some of the information that was included is confusing and hard to follow. I do like the quality of the graphics, but that hardly makes up for the other shortcomings.

There are much better choices available. I also bought Jim Cheshire Using Expression Web 2 and I found it to be much better.

One more thing. I'm not sure why the 5-star review that I see on this book appears here. It appears to be a review for the first Expression Web book from this author. It doesn't seem right for that to be used for this book. Strange.

I liked this book and found it useful. Software programs used to come with user manuals. The paper manuals allowed users to learn each new program. Over time, manufacturers eliminated including the manuals. The justification was that learning help for each new program was now "on line". Unless users printed the instructions, each "newbie" had to go back and forth between the new program and on-line help. No longer could you have a paper copy on hand to refer to unless you went through the expensive/time consuming process of printing the on-line help. No longer could new programs be studied while away from the computer. All of a sudden it became necessary to buy a user manual. The Visual QuickStart Guide is one of the best. It's understandable, useful, practical, and best of all written in non-geek.

I have never written a review before, but I felt compelled to warn others new to building websites who might buy this book. While the critical third chapter outlining how to structure a website appears an excellent presentation, there is NO mention of subwebs (these are the typical http://www.website.com/subweb/subweb2/etc that you see throughout the web.

What is presented is well written, but even though 2003 appears on the title, the author has not appeared to even open the help pages in the application to read what topics are currently present.

Thus there is no discussion of Share Point nor of the related web packages nor of security/passwords. Additionally, there is no discussion of the relationship between the remote computer and the version stored and published on the server. At this point I'm sure many other omissions may be present, but having "designed" a website and later deciding to break out part of it into a subweb, I found to my consternation that unless I was on a server running Share Point, I would have to completely rebuild my subweb from scratch. Of course I could copy the files, but the entire navigation/link structure and styling requires the use of a web package, and that is unavailable on a remote computer not running Server 2003.

Thus, Buyer Beware! This is an excellent, but fatally flawed and outdated instruction text. It may be of value for those who want to get the flavor of how to build a single web page, but beyond that, I suggest the prospective website builder would be well served to look to texts with greater depth.

I ordered this book for an online course. I think it's hard to read, but it's what I needed for the class.

Probably better than most text books on Dreamweaver 8 especially if you are taking a class with a real instructor. Not so good for self learning and so like the previous book on Dreamweaver MX 2004 (even the example web sites are identical) that it is hard to justify spending additional money on this version if you have the previous one.

I have designing pages for years, and I am forced to teach college students Dreamweaver. I picked up this book, skipped the beginners section and jumped right into the Advanced section (javascript and animation). And i did not have any problems!

Its nice to have a book to read, when you can't get online to do the free tutorials (like when you our on a business trip in an airplane =)

The book goes through the basics of Dreamweaver. The problem was that they needed to publish the Dreamweaver 3 book sooner because I was stuck buying this version.The book does teach alot of tricks and how to use the tools needed. Pay attention to the javascript behaviors that are included in the Dreamweaver that the book teaches.You can get everything in the book at the Macromedia site though. It's a good book for beginners!

Now that a newer version of Dreamweaver is available, this book has run its course. I look forward to the next edition by this fine author.

I agree; this book is not nearly as good as the free tutorial available on-line. Save your money.

Found the book poorly organized, the examples are terrible, you have to keep flipping back and forth and still author does not teach in any linear way. I found the online book from Macromedia far superior, and would not buy another book by this author.