Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Dynamic Applications: Advanced Training from the Source [With CDROM]

by Jeffrey Bardzell

Takes you through what you need to know to start designing dynamic, database-driven sites using the powerful tools available in Macromedia Dreamweaver MX. This work covers configuration options,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0321166809
• ISBN13: 9780321166807
• Release Date: February 2003
• Publisher: Macromedia Press
• Length: 440 Pages
• Weight: 1.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 8.0" x 10.0"

Customer Reviews

This is the book to learn Dynamic Apps!

I bought this book a couple of years ago and it's been quietly residing on my bookshelf. I am developing a new dynamic web site so it was time to take the book off the shelf, dust it off, and dive into it, even though I thought that some of the information in the book would be out of date (I recently upgraded to DW 8). To my surprise, nothing was out of date. All of the screenshots were the same and everything worked well. The publisher could replace the cover with one entitled DW 8 Dynamic Apps and you would not know the difference. More important, this is a great book. It's very well-organized and clearly written. Jeffrey Bardzell helps you build a web site using asp and DW. His instruction was crystal clear and before you know it, you have developed a dynamic web site. I highly recommend this book!

A Great Way to Learn Dynamic Web Applications

Jefferey Bardzell has done a masterful job of teaching how to use Dreamweaver, ASP and Microsoft Access to create truly interactive web sites. His presentation is very clear and the detailed examples are perfect. If you follow the book you will build a real world web site using most of the techniques you would ever need to build dynamic web applications. It covers communication between html pages and accessing databases on-line. He deliberately takes you through both hand-coding and using Dreamweaver.The editing and accuracy in this book is superb. For the one place where I encountered a problem there was a work around on the book's web site. This book is the real thing and definitely worth the money.To get the most out of this book, the reader should have some programming experience to fully appreciate the hand-coding examples. It is definitely not a book to start learning Dreamweaver.

Extremely useful

As a contract web designer for one of the areas largest credit card banks, I was well versed in static web page creation. Sure the online credit card application forms are dynamic, but my job was to create a static page that was later married to dynamic content by someone else. I knew that there was more to web design than static page content. This book gives you the bridge to take you from static to dynamic which definitely increases your salability as a web designer. Jeffrey Bardzell writes with an extremely clear style that makes for the understanding of some potentially deep information to be easy on the brain. Having read tons of software books in the past, it was sometimes very frustrating to figure out what the author was trying to convey. Not so with this book. Early on in lesson 4, I ran into a techo glitch (on my side) in setting up my computer with ColdFusion. I emailed Jeffrey and he solved the issue with a quick return email. I also teach graphic arts at a local college and the one thing that I constantly strive for in teaching is clarity of information. Jeffrey has done this on a consistent basis and I appreciate not only the great exercises of the book (I believe that you only learn by doing), the clarity of each step with the how's and why's, plus the feeling that I got that I can really learn this stuff. I would highly recommend this book if your want to take your skills to the next level.

Nothing Static Here

Jeffrey did a wonderful job on this book. He takes a complex subject and makes it understandable. He takes a static site and makes it dynamic. It includes cleaning up the code and making it XHTML compliant. The explanations of the difference of XHTML and HTML are very clear. The creative use of Find and Replace to strip out old tags and close others is very useful.In the redesign of the static site you'll use ASP and ColdFusion, add CSS and add an invisible navigation to accessibility reasons. You'll see the pros and cons of the various server models as well as adding a web form and configuring a server for SMTP message service.The book then moves into databases. A few basics but quickly move to displaying XHTML-formatted database content dynamically. You'll create a recordset to retrieve data to build a list of URLs dynamically. You'll also add images dynamically and generate the ALT attribute dynamically.A search is done and a registration page. An administration section is built to manage the content using update pages.If you are already familiar with Dreamweaver but want to learn how to use ASP and ColdFusion portions of the application, this is a great place to start. It's difficult for books that need to cover the entire application to go into this kind of detail. Plus I suspect that there are an awful lot of static sites out there that need to become dynamic (including mine). This book walks you though the process.