Customer Reviews

Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This is the book I've been waiting for.

When I used the Dreamweaver PHP tutorials, the sample files ended up throwing exceptions, and I wasn't able to finish the examples. In addition, the instructions and backup material on the Dreamweaver help pages were pretty sketchy. (Nothing against Macromedia, by the way...it's a wonderful product and the addition of PHP scripting support is very welcome).

This volume, however, fills in all the blanks. Dreamweaver users will find enough PHP info to round out the included scripts, and newcomers to MySQL and PHP will get all the information they need to find and properly install the files and servers on their local systems. The hotel reservation model works well, is well planned to introduce readers to the software and the underlying PHP/MySQL code, and produces a very nice product.

The authors have done a nice job in anticipating the sort of questions that newcomers to either PHP, MySQL, or Dreamweaver might have. More importantly (for this reader), the book delivers on its promise to teach the power of Dreamweaver to produce PHP/MySQL sites easily.

I hope the authors will consider another (Volume 2) addition to this fine book.

I have been using Dreamweaver for over 3 years and more recently Dreamweaver MX. I consider myself an expert in Dreamweaver, but I have never used its dynamic features. This book was a great resource for me. After reading through it, and its examples, I was creating PHP MySQL dynamic pages in two days. I never knew how easy Dreamweaver MX makes PHP MySQL development until this book explained it to me. This has unleashed a whole new aspect of Dreamweaver MX for me. I can't wait to start using it on my web sites.

Matt Review - Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development - Gareth Downes-Powell, Tim Green, Bruno Mairlot - Glasshaus

I am stunned. Real deer in the headlights stuff here. I have gone through so many books in the years I have been in the business and edited about 12 of them. This has to be the best, I mean the VERY best book I have ever seen dealing with databases and web programming. If I had had this book in 1996, I would have *owned* that damned sock puppet and half the other dot coms as well. This is a MUST have book not just for PHP but for any other application server because of the excellent treatment of SQL and how to build a complex application in Dreamweaver MX.

In fact, I would recommend this book and an install of PHP and MySQL for any developer to prototype their site regardless of the final application server or database you plan to use.

On to the meat.

The good...

The good stuff starts early and goes on for the whole dang book. There is a great overview of PHP (including an explanation of the original name for PHP, Personal Home Page Tools) and MySql that is enough to get a good picture of why to use the tools together.

The first chapter also walks you trough the setup of PHP simply and correctly. I had to reformat this machine and had not reinstalled PHP before reading this book and it was a perfect reference to install and I remember it being a lot harder when I went through the instructions at the PHP.net site where I got PHP in the first place.

The chapter on MySQL was as good as the PHP install instructions. It is followed by a good overview of setting up a site in DMX so that by the end of Chapter 2, you are ready to get to work and have done a real job of setting up your app server, database, and the connections to them in Dreamweaver MX. This is about 75 pages of the 350 page book. A real investment in getting you started well.

You have built a site before or you wouldn't be looking at a book like this, but have you really *planned* a site? Not to fear if you haven't you are going to get a good overview of that as well. Tim Green, the author of this chapter covers good design and planning of the sample site, a hotel, using flowcharts and modular design. There is also a detailed explanation of the tables that you need to create for the site and how they relate to one another.

This discussion is VERY useful regardless of the app server and database you are using. The techniques here are very easy to transfer even if some of the details are different than they would be in other databases.

The chapter on manipulating the database, Chapter 6 shows through some excellent examples how to use a lot of the built in features of DMX, not only covering the usual add, update, show records, but using showif commands in detail. Something that I see users ask about often.

The Advanced SQL Usage chapter is the best in the book though. Bruno Mairlot goes through SQL in a practical sort of way, showing examples and giving reasons of why you do things. This is a real gem. This chapter alone is worth the price of admission. I think that with this and the Learn SQL in Ten Minutes book that I swear by, you are going to have all the tools that you need to do almost anything.

The remainder of the book covers hand coding in DMX, tag libraries, debugging your web app, and a number of other issues that are not well covered everywhere else. The one remaining gem in the book is the coverage in Chapter 11 of the Server Behavior Builder. Given that Dreamweaver MX does not have the breadth of functions for PHP, that is does for ColdFusion or ASP.Net, this is a really important chapter. For the user of other server models, it is still a great way to get your feet wet with this tool.

The bad...

Short section here. I tried to find things I don't like about the book and I couldn't. The worst that I can say is that the pages are pretty full and I would have liked a little more whitespace to take notes. Pretty banal point really.

Face it, there really is nothing bad here.

(It would be nice to have a CD, but the code is available at the glasshaus site.)

The review...

What can I say. This is THE book. I am going to go through this again to go over some of the Advanced SQL over the weekend. This book is a must have if you are doing dynamic sites and a must-must have if you are doing PHP and MySQL.

10 out of 10 Matts.

This book is a must-have for anyone who wants to use the PHP_MySQL server model in Dreamweaver MX. The authors, who are very helpful members of the Dreamweaver user community, have given us something that is useful for new as well as experienced web developers.

Those who are new to dynamic web site development and do not have prior PHP knowledge can also easily get up to speed with how best to use PHP and MySQL with Dreamweaver MX.

If you have even rudimentary knowledge of Dreamweaver and MySQL, you can skip right to chapter 6. The first 6 chapters laboriously discuss Dreamweaver, PHP and MySQL, without giving any practical usage...instead the book repeats the same concepts over and over and over.

So, I was happy when I finally got to the part of actually using Dreamweaver to create a PHP application in Chapter 6. But I was disappointed to find that a lot of the steps simply tell you what to click on and what to enter, without giving you an explanation of what's going on behind the scenes and what it is you're actually doing. For instance, when you're developing the example application of a hotel booking system, when you create a Recordset the book sometimes says things like "Setup the Filter so it reads ID=Form Variable bookingID. This creates a record where the ID field matches the bookingID sent from a previous page." Well, OK. But there is absolutely no mention of what the other options are in the Recordset Filter dropdown menu, or what they do, or why the Form Variable works the way it does, or exactly how it pulls the information from the prvious page. Please tell me WHY this does what it does?

It surprises me that they could be so meticulous in explaining every little miniscule detail of everyday Dreamweaver functions, yet casually throw around the idea of using Dreamweaver to create PHP as if we already know how to do that, but are trying to learn the very basics of Dreamweaver instead.

I guess what I'm getting at is this: you could simply fly through the tutorial and build the example in no time, but when you're done you won't have a clue as to why half the things the book told you to do function the way they do, let alone take the knowledge to build YOUR OWN application. So, I'm taking the lessons VERY slow to try to soak it all in.

Oh, and one other annoyance. This book seems to be written by authors who use English as second language...the obscene overuse of the word "whilst" (sometimes 6 times per page) will have you pulling your hair out by Chapter 2. Who uses the word WHILST in real life????

I'm still laboring through the book...perhaps I'll write a follow-up when I finish. It's not terrible, but it could be better.

Bottom line: an even so-so, not a thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

This is an excellent resource for Dreamweaver MX users looking to extend their websites beyond HTML. You can't beat PHP and MySQL for creating DB driven sites at a low cost(free!), and this books helps to make it easy. Highly recommended!

I devoted a weekend to reading this book and building the tutorial. I started with no knowledge of PHP or any other web application languages besides HTML. It explains everything clearly and simply.

This book might be okay if you are already a PHP developer who wants to learn to use Dreamweaver MX, but if you want to learn PHP you are better off buying an introductory book on PHP, because you will have virtually no understanding of how to create a website using PHP from this book. The book is written more for someone already proficient in PHP who wants to learn DWMX. If you do buy this book, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by skipping the introductory chapters on installing PHP, MySQL and Apache by downloading a free pre-configured executable like SWAMP from Sourceforge (swamp.sourceforge.net). They were obviously in a real rush to get this book to print, the amount of errata is unacceptable, sometimes entire pages need to be crossed out with the correct text written in by hand. Print out the errata pages from their website before you do anything else. The book has a written by committee feel, with glaring omissions and where some of the pages seem to be in reverse order. Regarding the sample projects there is hardly no explanation of what you are doing or why you are doing it so you aren't really learning anything unless you already know PHP, you're just performing tasks by rote. Half-way through the book I decided I was wasting my time and bought "SAMS Teach yourself PHP, MySQL and Apache in 24 Hours". By contrast it is well done. Maybe when I finish it I'll try using this book again to try to learn how to use DWMX with PHP if no other books are available. I give this book 2 stars because there aren't any other books yet incorporating PHP and DWMX, otherwise I'd give it 1 star. This is the first Glasshaus book I've bought or read, and probably the last. Hopefully better books will be available soon.

I am an experienced Dreamweaver user and with the release of Dreamweaver MX I was inspired to take advantage of the new server capabilities (and my expensive DSL) and set up a web server. I needed to know PHP fast and this book is hands down the most complete introductory crash course available. I am, as i type this, buying the follow-up to this book called Advanced PHP Web Developement.

The biggest strengths of this book are that it gets you initiated into the exclusive and close-knit PHP club pretty quickly. And even better, it tells you how to do this using the provided Dreamweaver MX tools.

After mastering this book and devouring sections of it, you will be thirsting for more knowledge and scouring php bulletin boards for answers to your questions.

This book is a must-have for people looking to dive head first into the world of open source web developement and server-side scripting without drowning.

You will however find that this book is really only good for beginners and that you will very quickly find the plateau, leaving you grasping for more. But that is why I am buying the advanced php book: because I am ready for it now.

This is really a solid book on using Dreamweaver for PHP developing. Following the typical glasshaus approach the authors go straight to the relevant information, assuming the reader already know how to use Dreamweaver. A good amount of space is dedicated to MySQL and database-related topics, a wise choice in my opinion. All in all, a must have for Dreamweaver/PHP developers