Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 with Asp, Coldfusion, and PHP: Training from the Source [With CDROM]

by Jeffrey Bardzell

Learn by doing Follow along, step-by-step, as you upgrade a static HTML site that uses obsolete code to an XML standard-compliant, CSS-formatted dynamic site using Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP),... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321336259
• ISBN13: 9780321336255
• Release Date: November 2005
• Publisher: Macromedia Press
• Length: 508 Pages
• Weight: 1.84 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.1" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

DreamWeaver 8 Guide

The book has been great help with my current project and while I learn all about PHP and Dreamweaver.

Dreamweaver 8 with ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP

Excellent book. Very thorough, but not too much. Bardzell was very good at predicting questions in the book just as they occurred to me. That is, just as I'd start to wonder various things and consider exploring to find the answer; I'd go back to reading instead and in the following paragraph(s), there was the answer. Little to no confusion on the details of how things were supposed to be set up or organized. The book is also very aware of possible redundancy in that practically right at the same time that I repeating complete instructions for a process AGAIN was getting annoying, Bardzell chimed in to say something like: "you've done this several times now , so I'm going to assume you don't need a walk-through and conserve space for more pertinent information." I finished the entire book/example website in about 1.5 weeks (the 21-25 hours predicted work time seems very accurate) and was actually somewhat sad when I flipped the last page to find the index. Very many useful things presented in very understandable presentation--very good book.

Good Resource

One thing I am still not sure of with the whole Adobe - Macromedia merger is the status of Macromedia Press. Thier books are essential to any professional. When my Studio 8 came in the mail, the first thing I noticed was that there was no book inside. This book becomes paramount to now helping me through the changes with 8 with respect to Dreamweaver and it should for you too - especially if you like to thumb paper rather than scroll PDF's. Like earlier versions of this book, it conctrates your learning by going through the steps of a project. The accompaning cd has all the tutorial files as well as a trail version of DW8 - so no excuses. Depending on how long you have used DW, you might not find much in the first few chapters, but the lessons get intense quickly with lesson 3 having you set up a local server (note you best have Windows XP Pro to do this) and delving into dynamic web sites. The book does a good job at explaining the CSS features of Dreamweaver, however if you do not know CSS, best you get a book on that first before getting into this one. This book is for those ready to hit the ground running... no standing still on this one. Great trainging manual for introductory classes and intermediate and below users, though more advanced users could use it from the staff library to brush up skills or find an answer to the odd probelem associated with new releases.

Finally, a "complete" tutorial

I found this book to be an excellent tutorial for using Dreamweaver as a development environment. I used PHP, Apache and MySQL. While I hit a few snags ("BIT" datatype generated an error when accessed in Dreamweaver and I had to search the Web for a Dreamweaver problem) I did the whole process and got a real feeling for the entire dynamic/databased Web application environment. If you haven't built many Web pages before, I recommend working through your errors without just loading the completed pages from the CD. The results of the errors are instructive as well. I recommend also getting a reference book for Dreamweaver as this book doesn't cover every nuance of Dreamweaver (e.g. the History tab and undos).

You learn by doing, and I did.

If your like me, you've only started with all of this dynamic web site technology. I am relatively new to PHP/MySQL and Dreamweaver 8 but I really wanted to start learning so that I could build a site where me extended family could post announcements, photos, addresses, etc. I also wanted to make sure that data would be secure. By doing the exercises in this book, I was able to do just that. As I went through them, I became very comfortable with using Dreamweaver to retrieve data from a database and use the included server side behaviors. It was great to see Dreamweaver write the PHP code. In addition is achieving a level of understanding of the HTTP protocol and using the GET and POST methods to send data between pages that always used to confuse me. This is the first book that made me truly understand. And the author writes this in a way that doesn't make me feel stupid. It's just the right amount of repetition that eventually, when he says to perform a step like setting up a recordset, you can do it without needing to read the individual steps. Get this book if your new to all of this. I guarantee that you'll learn alot.