Customer Reviews

Dreamweaver MX 2004 Complete Course

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

 

 

My gosh, that previous review is harsh. Thankfully, I didn't read it before purchasing this book. That other reviewer must have an extremely low frustration threshhold (or maybe works for a competing publisher?) because the truth is that through this book Joyce Evan really got me up to speed with Dreamweaver MX with a minimum of pain. Not only that, her website reflects a tremendous respect for customers and readers. I have worked as a concert violinist, a music teacher, a college computer science instructor and cirriculum developer, and I have seen a wide variety of teaching materials. This book ranks with the best.

I am almost half way through this course. Out of all the books that I picked up I found this book the most clear, colourful and one of the easiest to use. The reason I am writing the review is because I saw the low score it is getting. I feel some people will miss a great opportunity in learning how to put a web page together by taking heed the rating its getting. The price might be high if your not that interested. Cheap if you push through the discomfort of making an effort and become a web designer, which you will become if you do push yourself.

This book is filled with full color illustrations and easy to follow, step by step, tutorials. It is a complete course, but it is just one course, Dreamweaver 101. I am sure that you will want to purchase or find additional information about XHTML, PHP, Flash, and Javascripting.

This book is not quite a "complete course" like the title says, but it is pretty good still. You just read through each section doing the little follow along projects that the author tells you how to do. The book is not that hard to follow, some of the other reviews here are a little too harsh. I am just a regular person with a little web design experience, and this book is no problem to keep up with. Overall, for the price the book is a little skimpy, but it is one of the few that when you are done you will have created a complete website, although it may be for a FAKE company and not you. I guess that all-in-all it is not the best or most informative Dreamweaver MX book out there, but it is more like a classroom experience than alot of the others, which can not ony make it easier to follow, but easier to stay interested in.

This book covers all the bells and whistles and is the same approach that other books cover. The result is the same, a big mess that confuses all beginners.

Since it seems there is a discrepancy in the other two reviews listed here, let's make mine the deciding vote for now. I have not been a computer instructor, violinist, nor have I smoked crack in an Ikea or done a Mormon book-a-thon. I am an average guy with mediocre basic computer skills. I found this book to be totally confusing. I tried to follow the tutorials closely, but I found that there were horrible gaps in the information necessary for me to get very far with it. The author claims that the book can be used by "beginners", and while I am not a complete beginner, I had trouble understanding how to do very much after Chapter 2. For someone with a good understanding of HTML and other design programs, this might be a good introduction to Dreamweaver, but for me, it just made me go out and buy Adobe Go Live because the interface is familiar and the program not too hard to understand.

If you want to know what it feels like to read this book, go to the center of an IKEA on a crowded Saturday afternoon, smoke a bowl of heroin-laced crack and try to find your way out.

Not since enduring the 24-hour Book of Mormon read-a-thon (too much to explain here) has reading been so traumatic. I know multiple Operating Systems, Applications, Programming Languages and have designed web-sites using straight HTML. Yet when I attempted these tutorials I found myself frustrated, confused and brain-dead.

Every single time I came to a step that didn't make sense, I'd reference the pictorial and, like clockwork, it was always the only step not pictured. I realized, after about 10 of these consecutive incidents, that the pictorial reference was a big joke. When arriving at the legendary 30-step tutorial called "Adding Rollovers" my book lay face-open on my desk for 4 days straight while I re-composed myself from all the trauma in the previous 135 pages. No application could possibly be as complicated as what is presented in this book.

If you are thinking about buying this book, please save yourself and close this web browser. Never click on any links that will get you near a buy button. I'm not even going to try and re-sell this on eBay because I can not conscious exposing someone to this agonizing methodical abuse.

I will never forgive Joyce Evans for what she has done. The anti-Christ is here and it's named Dreamweaver MX 2004 Complete Course.