Foundation Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

by Craig Grannell, David Powers, George McLachlan

* Practically orientated--teaches via a real website design. Reader will leave book with knowledge and a self-created website. All examples are useful in real-world web applications, source code will... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1590593081
• ISBN13: 9781590593080
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Apress
• Length: 450 Pages
• Weight: 1.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.8" x 7.5"

Customer Reviews

I love this book! I love Dreamweaver!

I've been doing amateur web design on and off for about 6 years now. I wanted to catch up with what the professionals are doing these days. I was not able to make sense of CSS until I got this wonderful book from my university bookstore. It's written with clarity and deep understanding of every step of the web design process. In addition to CSS and template, I loved the chapter on how to make the design on paper and then in Photoshop before heading to Dreamweaver. This helped a lot! The website I designed this time looks much better than any site I'd done before. Thanks so much! I'm still going to volunteer to design websites for the academic community, and I'm still going to refer to this book, esp. those interactive chapters in the second half of the book. Good job! Well done!

No wasting time in the shallow end here!

This is a great book for certain kinds of people, and maybe not so great for others, so it's important you're able to assess your style of learning to avoid disappointment with it.I love it and think it's one of the most fantastic books of its kind for any application -and I'll tell you why: they don't fill pages with over-detailed explanations of simple interface issues and figure that's teaching you the application; they teach you the application as a means to make sites. You're always in the thick of using Dreamweaver to accomplish the real-world tasks involved in designing, building and launching a site. They cover tangent technologies as they come up in the process of building the book's example site, so you're learning way more than just how to push Dreamweaver along -PHP, MySQL,the Apache server, CSS, accessibility issues, etc., -whatever you'd come across getting the site done and online. The catch is you need to be able to follow deep material covered in few pages, because it covers the most ground, in the most depth and in the fewest amount of pages I've come across in a computer book. YET- everything is explained so you're not left feeling steps were left out or that you're being told to just imitate without being given enough to understand why and what's going on. I love it because you're constantly being challenged to keep up with all the diverse information that weaves in & out of the website creation process. The layout helps enormously by breaking the information into different visual chunks per page, and the screen shots are big enough to be informative and clear despite being b & w throughout. An excellent return on your time investment with this one; you'll come away with a lot more understanding than just how to work Dreamweaver's interface, if you're willing and able to keep taking giant steps following along.

Thoughtfully written, not rushed, great value

I've always liked friends of ED books - not least because I used to work for a sister company before they were bought out by Apress. The Foundation series has always been their biggest-seller, as it combines a comprehensive overview of a tool for the newcomer (either newbie to Dreamweaver, or newbie to this particular release) with a considered, intelligent tutorial style. Quality used to be an issue for friends of ED; fortunately this book marks a return to form. The marketing guy who sent me the book explained that friends of ED were bored at reading the same dry, rushed-out books written on beta code that always accompany a new Dreamweaver release and so took the decision to wait until the community and its authors had a decent chance to use the software in the real-world before writing the book. Happily, as well, Macromedia released a new update to DMX 2004 that made it a lot faster and more stable, hopefully attracting more customers who'd held off from buying due to the quality issues in the first DMX2004 release, although this book doesn't address features added with the updater, like the return of the timeline.The authors of this book are professional developers David Powers and George McLachlan, and pro artist and designer Craig Grannell. Unlike many DW books, it doesn't only concentrate on the processes and technical procedures of Dreamweaver development; it acknowledges that you're using DW as a tool and the end-result is a site that has to look good and be attractive to whichever audience you're designing for. I found that refreshing in itself - throughout the chapters, there are aesthetic questions considered and it's never forgotten that you're designing for people rather than the dubious joy of squirting code up to a web server somewhere.Interestingly, unlike previous friends of ED Dreamweaver books which used Access and ASP as the default server model to teach with, this book uses PHP and MySQL - the most popular combo for web sites across the world. The authors write "we chose PHP because ... it's free, it's cross-platform, running on Windows, OSX and Linux, it's easy to learn and ... there are a large number of resources available".The book is structured around a case-study - a promotional site for photographic images of Iceland. (It's a shame that the book's only in black and white, as the images look great - but if monochrome keeps the cost down, that's OK by us, right?). The reason for the case-study approach is the same approach as we use at DMXzone for our articles (and our series Ideas to Implementation) - recognising that the easiest way to learn something is by doing it, and making it as relevant to the real-world as possible. So there's a short one chapter on the Dreamweaver IDE (if you're completely new) and then it's straight in with the learning curve.I won't go through every chapter individually; most notable are chapter 9 which builds the site using CSS rather than nested tables, chapter 10 which handily gives inst

Kudos....concise, well written & edited.......a great value!

(Update (...): this book is so important, I just bought another copy to replace the one I lost recently. My original review (below) still holds true. And, based on this book, I've pre-ordered the sequel!)Original review: So far I'm very pleased with this latest FOE book. I wish I knew who was writing each section, so I could address them personally, but I like the friendly encouraging tone of the writer(s) and the goal: page xiii, "starting with basic layout tasks, working through the creation of a static website based on templates, and ending with a fully dynamic, databased-driven site". And all in ~300 pages, sparing several large trees!(in my opinion, the British are still the best writers, anyway =) I've been using Dreamweaver since '99, and have always upgraded.I didn't like the latest version at first because of the CSS enforcement, but know it's really a good thing to use, and this book will help me make it a habit. I'm especially eager to learn to use DW 2004 with the PHP/Apache/MySQL model, and have always hit the wall on my own with other books. I feel confident this book will be the key to building dynamic sites.(UPDATE (...) Now on p236 & downloading phpMyAdmin as I write this; still verrrry happy & impressed with the book! It really has been the key to gettingDreamweaver/Apache/PHP/MySQL to work together....or rather, to enable me to set them up to create & test dynamic data-based pages. After I get the hang of it, I'll add Flash to the mix as the front end. Way cool!!! Great job! Keep it up, Guys!Thanks, (...)