Customer Reviews

ASP Web Development with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I've used DW for 3 years. Within the last year, I've begun using DW to build basic ASP pages, linking information from an Access database to my company's web site. I was ecstatic about this breakthrough, and so was my boss. She thought that since I could do this, I could do anything! That was a buzz-kill. I soon learned that I was going to be responsible for more dynamic web application development that was waaay over my head...

So, I bought this book (and every other DW/DB/ASP book I could find.) I flew throught this book in one night, and suddenly, things started to come to me. I was then able to use the examples in the book (and MANY resources online) to build the applications that I needed for work. I had NO grasp of cookies or sessions, and I sooned learned that these variables were the key to having my online users move through my web pages while entering information into a normalized database.

This book is well worth 30$, and I will use it often...

Yes, this book is about using ASP with Dreamweaver MX 2004 - in COMBINATION with MS SQL. I'm at home doing some personal programming and can't afford the SQL server software, so what good does this book to to me? A very small amount of the book is about ASP and access, which is the most commononly used database solution for small time web developers. Maybe a book entitled "ASP Web Development with DW MX 2004 for the Enterprise" would be a great idea.

I'm a moderately experienced ASP developer and was looking for some guidance on how best to apply Dreamweaver to my projects so I picked up this book based on various reviews I've read. I was sorely disappointed. The book is largely targeted at beginners and doesn't cover any of its topics to any depth.

The book doesn't get to ASP until Chapter 4 and the first 120 pages (or so) of this 400 page book are entirely fluff that should have been edited out. Chapter 3, for example, covers "Accessibility and Dreamweaver MX 2004" which, in and of itself, is not a bad topic but it doesn't fit the overall subject matter.

The remaining chapters cover database features built into Dreamweaver such as paging through a recordset or authenticating against a database using a form. These are interesting topics although they are easily learned by reading the online help and don't really have that much to do with ASP, specifically, as these features abstract the programmer from the code and are available when using Dreamweaver with other programming languages such as PHP.

In short, there is nothing groundbreaking in this book for anyone except the most basic beginners. If you have had mild exposure to ASP or Dreamweaver, save your money and use Dreamweaver's online help.

All I can say about Dreamweaver is, excellent program, very versatile and user friendly. It's super easy to use and makes the job of building pages incredibly fast and easy.

As for the first few examples in this book however, I found they could be be somewhat vague if you weren't really sure
what you were doing. Overall the examples provided were not bad. Although there were a few typos which is understanable,
sections were still easy to follow although I thought that the database section in chapter 6 was a bit vague and could be a
bit more user friendly.

I'm not sure that the book is written in such a way that a beginner would have a very easy time with it, however it does
have excellent examples and once you get going it has a good flow to it and before you know it you've completed everything
and have some great samples to save an reuse for next time.

In conclusion, I didn't exactly find everything I was hoping to in this book, but it did indeed turn out to be quite useful.
If your looking for a book with some good samples and is a fairly easy read, I would recomend this. If your a beginner, you
may want to start with something a little more basic and then move up.