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Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual
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by David Sawyer McFarland
Sales Rank: 7440
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Discount: 46 %
List Price: $44.95
$29.67
At Amazon
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Paperback: 952 pages
Publisher: Pogue Press; 3Rev Ed edition December 22, 2005
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0596100566
ISBN-13: 978-0596100568
Product Dimensions:
9.1 x 7 x 1.8 inches
Shipping Weight: 3 pounds
Book Description
Available for both the Mac and Windows, Macromedia's Dreamweaver 8 is a professional web design and development program used by millions of Internet professionals to build high-quality static and dynamic database-driven web sites. It offers drag-and-drop simplicity, streamlined HTML coding tools, and powerful database integration features. But Dreamweaver 8 is missing one vital component: a printed manual.
Enter Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual, the completely revised fourth edition of this bestselling book by experienced web site trainer, Macromedia Certified instructor, and Dreamweaver Advisory Council member David McFarland. This book enables both first-time and experienced web designers to create visually stunning and highly interactive web sites.
With crystal-clear writing and much welcome humor, this new edition offers features such as:
- Live examples: With McFarland's step-by-step annotated tutorials, you'll learn how to construct a state-of-the-art commercial web site, complete with working forms, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and dynamic databases.
- Tricks of the trade: The book is bursting with undocumented workarounds and shortcuts for easing the process of building, maintaining, and updating professional web sites.
- Design guidance: You'll learn to create virtually every modern web feature, including forms, animations, cascading menus, and more--and you'll find out which browsers you need to provide special coding or do extra testing with.
No matter what your level of expertise is, you'll also learn how to manage your entire web site-whether you've just launched or if it's been around for awhile and takes up thousands of pages. Beginners with no web design experience will appreciate the step-by-step guide to designing, organizing, building, and deploying a web site; long-time Dreamweaver users will appreciate the advanced, real-world techniques for controlling the appearance of their web pages with CSS.
With more than 500 illustrations, a handcrafted index, and the clarity of thought that has made bestsellers of every Missing Manual to date, this is the ultimate atlas for the complex and powerful Dreamweaver 8.
About The Author
David McFarland has been designing web sites since 1995. He's a professional web designer and educator who has worked with the University of California at Berkeley, Intuit, and Macworld magazine among others. He is a frequent speaker at web-related conferences and teaches web design and development at Portland State University. He is a Macromedia Certified instructor and a member of the Dreamweaver Advisory Council.
Customer Reviews & Comments
ORIGINAL REVIEW (Apr. 27, 2006): "Heavy on details, and just plain heavy!" -- This is a really heavy book, and it's loaded with great examples, explanations, and illustrations. Unlike most Dreamweaver books, which stick either to basic, static web design or to advanced, dynamic pages, this book runs the gamut, not skimping on either (but certainly concentrating on the former). The chapters are organized logically, the chunks are reasonably small, and many of the chapters end with a very illustrative hands-on example to demonstrate the topics covered. Supplemented with on-line materials only available to owners of the book (for example, five chapters on PHP and SQL), the book covers almost everything, although a couple of topics (animation and frames) are available only as freely downloadable chapters from the prior (2004) edition of the book. The style is less formal than many other books, but the material is covered in depth and accurately, for the most part. Like almost every technical book, the book's first printing does contain a reasonable number of minor errors, so be sure to refer to the author's website and take note of the errata before digging in. The book is printed in black and white with no color plates, but this does not affect its usability at all. Despite the book's title, this really isn't a "manual" for Dreamweaver -- it's more of a primer. If you're an advanced user looking for a reference volume to provide a quick reference into every picayune detail of Dreamweaver, this isn't your book. This also isn't your book if you're looking for anything other than a first-pass introduction to ASP, PHP, or one of the other server models. But if you're a novice to HTML or a seasoned web designer making the jump from manual coding to the advanced WYSIWYG features of Dreamweaver and need a gentle immersion into the broad power of Dreamweaver 8, this is a great book to use. For this reason, this is easily my favorite Dreamweaver book. ADDENDUM (10 Sept. 2006): "Where did the support go?" -- The errata page for the book has not been updated since June. There are more than a few reported errors still outstanding that have not been added to the errata list; I know because I submitted them myself through the O'Reilly website. It appears that support for this title has ended -- or at least that it has been put on the back-burner -- despite Dreamweaver 8 still being the current version. That's particularly disappointing because it's so un-O'Reilly to let mistakes go like this. Because of the lack of ongoing support, and because I have since discovered some better Dreamweaver books (see my other reviews), I would drop my rating of this book from 5 stars to 4. ADDENDUM (5 Oct. 2006): The errata page has, finally, been updated. According to the email I received from the publisher, O'Reilly had some issues migrating its errata-tracking system to a new server this summer, causing the long delay. These issues are now resolved, and the errata are appearing regularly again.
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Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual
List Price: $44.95
Discount: 46 %
Available from Amazon
Price: $29.67
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