HTML Authoring Books

Her book was the only book I got for creating a Website with Dreamweaver and Fireworks. Following her tutorials I built a fabulous Website with cascading style sheets, rollovers, the works. I was never bored or confused, and I understood the "why" and well as the "how."

I've just downloaded a trial version of Dreamweaver MX and came here specifically to get HER book on Dreamweaver MX. Sadly, she doesn't seem to have published one.

Lynda Weinman knows what she is talking about. I have learned quite a bit following her lead.

I highly recommend this book. It was an excellent learning tool for me as a beginner. The tutorials were fabulous!

I enjoyed the exercises and layout of the book. For someone who never did any web development this book is great.

I must say that Lynda is, hands down, the best instructor I've ever come across on the printed page. I've been using Dreamweaver for over two years and I learned so much from this book. The chapters and exercises were so concise, so ordered and really a lot of fun. I recommend this book whole-heartedly!

This book gives you a broad scope of the to be used topics when creating elearning sites. You will get a quick tutorial of the most important Macromedia features to get the process done. In a clear way building up from using templates, attaching stylesheets, showing and hiding layers with Dreamweaver and using Flash for simulation and user-interactivity the book introduces the interaction with databases by using Coldfusion.

I thought Coldfusion was rather difficult to learn, because the tips of the week by Macromedia were a little to quick for me. But Jeffrey Bardzell proved it is easy. In a straight-forward way you are taken by the hand to take all the basic steps for building a data-driven website.

I'm an assoc. prof. of New Testament currently working to produce an interactive web workbook for teaching/learning skills for New Testament interpretation. I want to give students practice developing close reading skills rather than ask them simply to drill content. For a couple of years, I have had a dream for such a site, and I felt sure it was buildable, but didn't know how. I care enough about how the interactions work and the relationship of content to design that I wanted to design the interactions myself if possible. Yet I didn't know anything but a little Dreamweaver and its CourseBuilder extension.

Working my way through a copy of Macromedia MX eLearning is changing all that. Wow! The book teaches how to develop interactions in Dreamweaver and Flash as well as offering several chapters on putting ColdFusion to work in eLearning. Each chapter includes a fine combination of hands-on work and explanation for why we are being asked to do what we're doing, especially at those places where some task is counter-intuitive. The book is also free of mistakes, typos and muddled language, a welcome plus when so many computer books seem to have been rushed to press without having been edited or proofed.

Bardzell's book is giving me two things: (1) hands on work with the software that introduces and reinforces learning without devolving into busywork and (2) a model for developing materials (like the book itself) that teach effectively from a distance. A+

I am a trainer and instructional designer at a university. I thought this book was very useful in helping me to use Flash MX for education. You would likely need some introductory training in Flash and Dreamweaver basics before using this book.

This is an excellent book where you learn how to integrate ColdFusion MX, Dreamweaver MX, and Flash MX by building interactive learning applications. The exercises are explained in great details and contain many tips and techniques especially for Dreamweaver and Flash. The newer aspects of interacting ColdFusion MX with Flash MX are not covered, but for those of us still using ColdFusion 5 there is a good coverage of LoadVars. I recommend this book without any reservation as it is one of the best technical books I have read so far.

Jeffrey Bardzell's book is intelligently written with plenty easy-to-understand examples. He engages, inspires, and motivates learners throughout. His Dante's Inferno project makes learning fun. He breaks subject matter down into comprehendible pieces, using Aristotelian logic in places. This guy knows what he's doing. Of several computer books that I have purchased over the years, this is the first time I have written a review. You can learn eLearning and website design, and this book will teach you how-even if you are a motivated beginner, technical type, or humanities person-this book is suited for most everyone.

This is a thick, heavy book, hard to hold, worth the trouble. It doesn't solve every problem but it comes close, and offers links for more insight and details. If you are looking for a way to understand what you are working on, for a foundation from which to be creative, good book.

For those that are just starting out with Dreamweaver CS3 this is a complete breakdown of all the technical stuff but in a non-technical language. The tutorials are easy to follow and give you a good basis for creating your own website. It is rather lengthy but not every word needs to be read to follow along. As your skills increase there is information that will allow you to learn at your own pace.

This manual reads so easily, works great as a reference and has a tutorial to follow after most of the key chapters. This is by far the easiest method I've found for learning this complex program. The author also speaks to mac and pc specifically if there are any differences. Great product!

The book is clear and provides good "learn by doing" exercises to reinforce the explanations. It also serves as a good reference. I was immediately able to create a website for a non-profit that I am a member of. Highly recommended.

David McFarland's guide answers most, but not my any means all, of the questions, a beginner or intermediate user might ask about Adobe Dreamweaver, the absolute best commercial program for web design. It's a good start and McFarland writes clearly and accurately but doesn't always follow through to the depth that some users nned. That said, it's still probably the best book yet published on Dreamweaver, useful and easy-to use.
JoeGraphics, Memphis, TN

I like to just jump in. Hate reading instruction manuals, find most of them little better than the cause of a good nights sleep. This book is my first exception!
Sure I have still jumped in but have also worked my way through this book from the beginning and am finding the answers to my problems as I create them. Also finding that the book is interesting enough in itself, that I am avoiding creating problems. A first!
Will buy another of McFarlands books now, on CSS. His style is very readable and easy to follow.

I bought this book hoping it would be all that I would need to build my sites with cleanly and yet some complexity. I've found that I'm often at the library borrowing many other Dreamweaver 8 titles and finding them much more helpful. I've found finding specific help in this book a bit difficult, and the chapter progression doesn't really make sense. My main background is design and the arts - but I don't think this book is too technical for me... just counter-intuitive in its structure. I much prefer the Sitepoint books so far... even the Dreamweaver for Dummies are at least just as good, and much less expensive. Would not recommend to buy - maybe try it at your library first.

The title says it all. This is an must-have resource when learning Dreamweaver and the authors give you tips, shortcuts, as well as explanations for many of these tips and shortcuts which help you seriously cut through the clutter and get to the point, which is how to get your site up and running! I bought it along with Dreamweaver Hands On Training and I think it a great compliment.

For those who find it hard to follow on line help or tutorials, this is the book for you. The Missing Manual series is very instructive and helpful to those who are just beginning and to those who are well on their way to using Dreamweaver. Commands that you may have forgotten are easy to find in this book. I would recommend it.

I'll keep this short. Starting as a total novice in Dreamweaver this book has taught me pretty much everything I need to know. When ever I get stuck now I can get the answers that I need. Certainly blows the online help from Adobe out of the water. This is a must have book.

This book's ok overall. Though, the app itself is updated to a new version so often that I don't really think that buying the new version of the book every time is required. I'm using DW4.x now and I still refer to the 2.0 book for many of the features.

Its extremely rare when a product with such power can be put to use so quickly. The Dreamweaver 2 Bible gives and excellent introduction to all of Dreamweavers features, from the easiest to the more complicated. It accomplishes this while remaining easy to read and understand. Anyone who has worked with other web site creation tools knows that such an accomplishment is rare.

If your just getting started in web site creation or looking to get a better command of Dreamweavers more powerful abilities, feel confident that this book will get you going.

I've used this book extensivley as a guide when I couldln't figure out how to get something done. I think this is a great book for someone who needs that back-up.

I was thrown into handling our company's website after word got out that I had "web design experience". Laughable, considering I had only done a couple personal web pages that merely linked to other sites. After going through Dreamweaver's very brief manual, I realized that I needed something much more comprehensive. Armed with this book, determination, and a lot of experimenting, after two weeks I took over our web presence without too much difficulty. No mean feat considering we get several thousand hits per week.

Granted there are still chapters that I'm still working through after five months, but whether I'm learning something new or just re-visiting an old topic, this book has never let me down.

If you use Dreamweaver, you owe it to yourself to get this "must have".

Great, easy to read. Both for beginners and professionals.

Okay, I haven't read many. But I am about as web literate as it takes to fool around with some link and image codes on my blogs. When I first picked it up, it seemed like she got into much more detail than I would be able to digest or would even want to! But once I started reading it, the explanations are so clear that I haven't been intimidated by a single exercise yet! I've done every exercise so far with so much ease I'd mistake myself for a genius if I didn't know any better. I've only had the book for three days and I'm already on the tables section! Now, I admit, I only picked up the book so that I could learn to build a very, simple website. I know enough now to take that a step or two further. I'm sure that to get the terminology down, I'll have to give the book a second read and re-visit here and again for brushing up on some things. But, I don't consider that a draw back. It's more like a book to grow with. Hands down, the author has done an excellent job in my opinion. I've read some reviews about the code typos and not being able to get the code to work because of typos. All I can say is that the explanations are so clear that the typos become so apparent that you can figure out why the code didn't work and fix it yourself.

For those looking to start web design this is the book to get. It says illustrated but it should say illustrations on every page. Very very illustrated. One of my favorite things about this book is after every chapter(when HTML is disscused)it provides an appendix showing you the html tags you just learned. Useful as a reference. This book does not leave you hanging. It teaches you every thing you need to create and understand basic websites. About half the book introduces you to html tags and the other portion is about web graphics. Jenn's style of writting is not boring but is often humerous and cozy. I have created 4 websites after reading this book. Buy this book!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi. This is Jennifer Robbins, the author of Learning Web Design. If you are interested in this title, I highly recommend that you get the Third Edition which is now available. A LOT has changed in the way web sites are built since the second edition of the book was published, and I'd hate for anyone to be getting out-of-date information. Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to (X)HTML, StyleSheets, and Web Graphics

I needed to understand how domain names and webhosting worked, plus design, program, test, and implement a website quickly. This book was perfect -- extremely well-organized, with a good Table of Contents and index, excellent examples and helpful (but not overwhelming) reference tables. The book had sufficient detail that I could get graphics loaded and use some CSS to make my text look more professional. I launched a good-looking, no-frills site for a club without any fancy animation, and got it up and running in a less than a month of evenings and weekends. The demo software (BBEdit) was invaluable to getting me started. Good treatment as well of issues with .gif, .jpeg, and .png files, and I feel that I can still learn more from this text should I want to make the site more sophisticated. The discussion of tables was especially clear. I recommend this book for anyone, even if you've never designed your own site or written a lick of html. Those wanting to do online forms to allow users to submit data will need to learn Javascript.

This is this first "How To" book I ever read cover to cover. It works. It is well written, and breaks concepts down without making you feel like a "dummy". It's perfect for a novice like me.

So many things that were a mystery to me were explained. I now can do rollover buttons, animations, add music, etc. But most important is the Web design concepts this book drives home. It teaches how to make a balanced, well structured, and most importantly, user friendly web page. I highly recommend this book.

Great product. In many cases, ``beginner's'' guides are no such thing -- just a place for the author to show off their knowledge, but provide little of value to the reader. This book is an exception. Love the step-by-step instruction, practice exercises, additional tips. Have recommended this book to my co-workers

I have had limited experience creating web pages. Learning Web Design has made the task so much easier. This book is very clearly written with great examples. I would highly recommend if you are just starting out or looking for a text to use in the classroom.

1. If you are already a Web Developer with knowledge of HTML, Form, URL etc, then this book wont add anything more to your knowledge.
2. Most often Web Developers (not Web Designers) lack knowledge about image/icon creation, CSS, DOCTYPE types, XHTML etc. This book gives a good explanation of those concepts.
3. The best part of book is the Part III (chapter 11 to 17) that explains the concepts of CSS. Anyone who liked 2 and 3 will also like Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML (Head First) that seems to be structured similarly and provides similar knowledge.

This is an excellent resource to learn modern W3C-standards-compliant web design from the ground up. It is up-to-date , well organized, well written, and easy to follow. By the time you're done with it, you will be well on your way to being able to call yourself a web designer with a straight face. My only complaint is that the book is physically fragile and the binding completely falls apart even with moderate use. And given how great this book is in all other respects, mere "moderate use" is pretty much out of the question - this will be your constant companion as you take your first steps in web design.

I rate this book with 5 stars for being a solid introduction to (X)HTML and CSS and for being clear, easy to follow, and colourful.

I disagree with the previous reviewer BB, who said the book was not for beginners and rated it with one star. He mentions Jennifer N. Robbins uses vocabulary she hasn't defined before. Well, if he's talking about terms like web browser, web server, or link, I might agree with him/her, but hey, those words are common vocabulary words for any Internet user. Perhaps if he had pointed out specific words, I might have said a bit more on his review.

Let me convince you: I'm not a native English speaker and I got the information perfectly well.

It is a shame this book has fallen into 4.5 stars just because of one 1 star rating review informing about problematic issues with no sort of justification or examples proving what the reviewer is complaining about.

In any case, we have to respect his/her opinion, though I didn't take his comments or rating into account when deciding whether to buy the book or not; the book turned out just fine, as I had expected based on the other reviews.

Jennifer Robins has done a great job introducing the reader to virtually all html elements (I guess all, but a professional might notice a few of them are missing).

The contents are colourful as hell, well organised, and they follow a static format scheme that allows for easy readability; the author uses sidebars every now and then to point out key information; the book shows she has a clear mind on how to get a beginner to digest the information presented.

I think the technique she used to introduce us to the different aspects of html/css is just the more appropiate for a starter book. She goes over every aspect, then she writes a sample code about that specific one, and then she shows the resulting page. Once again, she'll colour-code the html code, and then either encase the result in a box, or take a screenshot.

Where I want to get to here is, you aren't going to find a ten pages long html code combining every single element she's gone over and beating the crap out of everyone who tries to read it and point out each section in the resulting html page.

That being said, and bearing in mind the other reviews, I guess nothing else can be said about this great piece of work.

An amazing and thorough book! Each chapter teaches you the information in two ways: one in the standard paragraphs and illustrations, then the second at the end of each lesson with a detailed tutorial to follow in the Dreamweaver program itself. So you can choose to learn the lesson the way it best suits you. There were a couple of lessons where I skipped right to the tutorial, a couple where I didn't feel that I needed to go through the tutorial, and some where I went through both.

Don't be intimidated by the size of the book (800+ pages), it is not dry or boring. It is simply packed with great information that takes you step by step from novice to just about expert. And maybe I shouldn't say this, but it would be a bargain at three times the price.

If you need to learn Dreamweaver MX 2004, there is no other book. This is the one you need. :)

Fantastic, really simple tutorials and suggested websites for further info. Deals with the basics to get an extemely powerful website online.

There are many more aspects to web design but anyone from the total beginner to intermediate should find this book helpful.

Better than Dreamweaver MX 2004 "Training From the Source". This is a step by step book for beginners thru experts. I found it easy to follow and understand. It is also a good reference book for the experienced, which I am not. Why Macromedia could not furnish a book like this with there software I will never understand. The same goes for the new Dreamweaver 8. They want you to buy there product but not show you how to use it. This is a good buy.

So many software books are so confusing and difficult to understand, I really appreciateone that is clear and truly helpful, which this one is.

I have read this book cover to cover. You can read it in front of your computer and perform the tutorials or you can simple read an look at the illustrations. Both provide you with a very accurate experience. The online web site allows you to download all of the necessary files to perform your labs if you desire. It is simple, elegant, and well thought out book. You can't walk away from this book and not say that you did not truely learn to use Dreamweaver MX 2004. I struggled to learn this program, after reading the book, I have built several complex websites, complete with dynamic database integration. This book is that good!

I borrowed this book from the local library. Actually I was looking for the HomeSite 4.5 for the dummies, but had to settle for this one since I couldn't find it. The book says teach yourself in 24 hours and I think it really meant it. I managed to digest most of them in a few days working to about 24 hours in all. It's a very simple book to teach you the fundamentals on HomeSite. I found it to be too brief in some of the topics. Just teach you the most basic stuff. It could be better if the book could give more examples. In summary, this is a good book if you just want to know how do get started. You will still need another book on HTML to do the more advanced stuff.

Vety information, easy to read, and full of useful information. Lots of basics, and excellent tips and suggestions. I learned lots about the Web and HTML (even though I knew both already) while learning HomeSite with this book.

When I bought HomsSite, I was having some trouble understanding part of the program so I went looking for a book and found Forta's. When I got the copy, I went to the section where I was trying to solve the problem. (It had to do with the icons in the Resource window.) I got more confused because what Forta was telling me to do didn't match with the program.

After tearing out my hair for awhile, I found the problem: I had HomeSite 4.5 and Forta was writing about 4.0 and his book didn't show the changes, including exactly what I was trying to solve.

In short, I had wasted my money.

So be careful of the 4 in that title. If you are using 4.5, you might be in trouble. There is that much change between the two.

I have been a self-taught user of HomeSite for quite awhile now. I attended a HomeSite class but it was just too basic. I wanted to beef up my html pages with Image Maps and create forms which allowed for multiple selections.

I searched the web for the information but wound up going back to the HomeSite book. It was quite easy to find the answers I was looking for.

There are a few things that bother me about HomeSite such as, if I create an html file and save it into the directory, the file doesn't show immediately. Instead of looking for an answer in the book to that question, I figure it is something I would need to take up with Allaire Technical Support - the owners of HomeSite.

But, overall, the book has been a great savings of my time and effort and I'm pleased to have it in my library!!

I'm rating this book 5 stars because it does what it sets out to do. Plain and simple.

People who can't seem to find help with this book are those that can't learn unless they are in a curricular environment with its instructors.

Before purchasing HS 4.5 and this book ... , I had tried the trial version of the program from Allaire's web site. Granted I fell in love with the program and as DIY'ers do, I found my way around. But there were still questions I had so I bought this book. It pretty much answered any nagging questions that remained.

You know? There will ALWAYS be questions that you can never seem to get answered. That is life and you deal with it. I read one review of someone that said they bought this book hoping to find out why HS4.5 copies your html files and creates a clone file with the prefix of hs~(filename).html. This book didn't answer their questions so they slammed the book. I STILL don't know why HS4.5 does this but WHO CARES? It doesn't affect my sites. I don't have to upload them.

In a nutshell, if the manuals and online help that ship with HS4.5 aren't enough, buy this book. You'll need it and refer to it often. This book, HTML 4.0 Quickstart Guide, and a passion to learn more, and apply lots, are all you need to build sites with Homesite 4.5.

Quit running around looking for the RIGHT book.

Build some... sites.

I bought this book thinking I would learn a lot. I've done very little JavaScript and Ajax before so I was expecting to soak this up like a sponge. I did the examples and read through the book and felt like I got a great introduction to using Ajax with Rails. That's the problem though, I feel like the book needs more meat, especially in the RJS section. Now that I have a good foundation, I'm looking elsewhere for more intermediate concepts that should've been part of this text.

It's a good book, the structure and ideas are clear and comprehensive maybe I miss to download the examples' code from internet but I quite a few happy with this purchase, I got my money's worth.

The chapters are short and cover what is needed to start programming in any of the subjects they cover such as: prototype, rjs. Examples are also well chosen.

This book assumes good level of familiarity with javascript and ruby on rails.

I've bought this book with expectation. The title implied the feeling that this book would be THE book I'd ever need for AJAX on Rails. However it gave less than I've expected. There's a large portion of reference material you can easily find in the rails documentation. It was an easy read, I've completed in one day. In the end, I found Peepcode videos to be more informative than this book.

Why do I have to buy a book for documentation? I can look it up online for free. People learn by examples. These book needs more examples than just reproducting the dry documentation.