Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques

by David Karlins

Adobe Dreamweaver is a key component of an overall Web design workflow that allows users to work seamlessly among all of their applications to create graphically rich content for the Web, motion... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321508939
• ISBN13: 9780321508935
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Adobe Press
• Length: 280 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

A Quick Reference

This book is fantastatic as a quick reference. It gives you answers in short time. For example: if you want to do "this", press "this", "this" and then "this" and it's done. However, it must be stressed that I'd recommend buying another book--one that is more thorough in explaining how to use Dreaweaver to build and manage a web site--in addition to this one--unless you are already proficient in HTML and a previous version of Dreamweaver.

A Great "HOW TO" book for Dreamweaver CS3

This book has been a great help for me while switching from Frontpage to Dreamweaver. The book is very clear in illustration and detail and was useful in the immediate set up of my website. I work with all Adobe products and this was my last learning curve - made easy with this book. Thanks, R. Grant

Good book to learn the basics

I found this to be book informative and a good way to become familiar with this excellent product.

An EXCELENT Guide

"Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 How-Tos", by David Karlins, is an excellent resource for web-designers, graphic designers and anyone who may be using Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. Whether you are an expert or a novice the reader will find a concise and easy to read breakdown of creating an effective web-site with several tips on how to do it more efficiently along the way. With the importance of web sites for business use in today's culture, everyone from the average person working for any business to more tech savvy professionals like graphic designers are finding themselves in the position of needing to have a website. For many, the option exists of assigning or hiring someone else to build such a site. But for many others, that option doesn't as easily exist. So today people are learning how to build and maintain websites like never before. Adobe's Dreamweaver CS4 is a web authoring tool designed to help web designers and developers create websites with a lot of handy features. Users can build sites in either a coding mode for those comfortable with writing straight HTML or CSS, or they can build with a Design mode for those more comfortable using a layout style interface. There is even a hybrid where you can code and view a preview at once. But for many who are completely new to web design, using even Dreamweaver's most basic features can be something of a daunting task. In his book, David Karlins sets out to break down 100 of the most common tasks users need to know how to accomplish with Dreamweaver, and explains them in a simple fashion. The book works well as a textbook to be read alone, as a guide to walk step-by step through each topic while working in Dreamweaver or even as a quick reference for designers and developers who simply need a desktop reference. However, this is not just a book for current Dreamweaver users. This book is also suited well for somebody who has no prior experience with building websites but may desire to learn from scratch. Karlin's writing style is very easy to read which is a treat since the nature of web design can get pretty confusing at times. This book is not heavy reading, so if you are considering getting into web design I would encourage you to pick up a copy. [...]

Clear, concise, excellent How-To guide to Dreamweaver CS3

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques is exactly the book I needed to help me move from Adobe GoLive, which is being phased out, to the similar -- but different enough to be confusing -- Dreamweaver CS3. This book showed what could be accomplished through a clear and detailed hands-on approach to this feature-rich but daunting program. The book is well structured into 100 brief, informative sections. They are useful individually -- meaning you can look up precisely what you need for a task and get a complete, but not overwhelmingly exhaustive, explanation with step by step instructions. (If it's essential that you know some underlying technique, the author tells you where in the book to find it -- but mostly, what you need is right there.) The sections are also tied together into a dozen chapters on related techniques, that progress logically from the basics of creating a site to the full range of bells and whistles, from styling to forms to embedding media (Flash, QuickTime, Windows Media) to DW CS3's cool new Spry animation effects. There is an extraordinary amount of useful information presented in just 250 pages, yet the book never feels crammed. However, it could have used a few more illustrations, including ones for completed projects -- although the author purposely leaves it up to the reader to implement the techniques that he explains. I like this approach. The book is much more illuminating than DW CS3's built-in Help fragments, that constantly send you to yet more -- and more -- references, many times without really telling you how to do something. Here the author has the space to provide both brief context and practical instructions. This book is also a lot more useful than the overpriced Adobe Classroom in a Book (CiB) that focuses on about a dozen large-scale "representative" projects -- if you're lucky, somewhere in the countless steps is the small piece of info you need to get a specific job done. By contrast, this book is the best of both worlds: more detailed and practical than the built-in Help and much more accessible than CiB. Goldilocks would love this book, since it's not too small, and not too big -- it's just right. I also appreciate that, for all of its conciseness, the writing has a friendly 'can do' quality. The main content is clearly separated from the subsidiary information presented in sidebars. This 'bonus information' often explains why it's best to do something a certain way (often to increase the accessibility of Web pages for people who are visually impaired, or who simply turn off images for faster browsing). The only major topic missing is how to connect a DW site to a database, which with all the flavors (ASP, Cold Fusion, many more) would require a separate guide of this length. The book wisely devotes many sections to the features that are brand new in DW CS3, including a strong focus on CSS-based layouts. The Internet has adopted 'best practices' standards -- meaning CSS-based page