Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual (Paperback)

by David Sawyer McFarland (Author)
Key Phrases: dynamic data button, current local site, folder horoscopes, National Exasperator, Cascading Style Sheets, Internet Explorer (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Available for both the Mac and Windows, Macromedia's Dreamweaver 8 is a professional web design and development program used by millions of Internet professionals to build high-quality static and dynamic database-driven web sites. It offers drag-and-drop simplicity, streamlined HTML coding tools, and powerful database integration features. But Dreamweaver 8 is missing one vital component: a printed manual.

Enter Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual, the completely revised fourth edition of this bestselling book by experienced web site trainer, Macromedia Certified instructor, and Dreamweaver Advisory Council member David McFarland. This book enables both first-time and experienced web designers to create visually stunning and highly interactive web sites.

With crystal-clear writing and much welcome humor, this new edition offers features such as:

• Live examples: With McFarland's step-by-step annotated tutorials, you'll learn how to construct a state-of-the-art commercial web site, complete with working forms, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and dynamic databases.
• Tricks of the trade: The book is bursting with undocumented workarounds and shortcuts for easing the process of building, maintaining, and updating professional web sites.
• Design guidance: You'll learn to create virtually every modern web feature, including forms, animations, cascading menus, and more--and you'll find out which browsers you need to provide special coding or do extra testing with.

No matter what your level of expertise is, you'll also learn how to manage your entire web site-whether you've just launched or if it's been around for awhile and takes up thousands of pages. Beginners with no web design experience will appreciate the step-by-step guide to designing, organizing, building, and deploying a web site; long-time Dreamweaver users will appreciate the advanced, real-world techniques for controlling the appearance of their web pages with CSS.

With more than 500 illustrations, a handcrafted index, and the clarity of thought that has made bestsellers of every Missing Manual to date, this is the ultimate atlas for the complex and powerful Dreamweaver 8.

About the Author
David McFarland has been designing web sites since 1995. He's a professional web designer and educator who has worked with the University of California at Berkeley, Intuit, and Macworld magazine among others. He is a frequent speaker at web-related conferences and teaches web design and development at Portland State University. He is a Macromedia Certified instructor and a member of the Dreamweaver Advisory Council.

Product Details

• Paperback: 952 pages
• Publisher: Pogue Press; 3rd edition (December 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596100566
• ISBN-13: 978-0596100568
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 7 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #78,876 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

87 of 89 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heavy on details, and just plain heavy!, April 27, 2006

By	JM - See all my reviews

ORIGINAL REVIEW (Apr. 27, 2006): "Heavy on details, and just plain heavy!" -- This is a really heavy book, and it's loaded with great examples, explanations, and illustrations. Unlike most Dreamweaver books, which stick either to basic, static web design or to advanced, dynamic pages, this book runs the gamut, not skimping on either (but certainly concentrating on the former). The chapters are organized logically, the chunks are reasonably small, and many of the chapters end with a very illustrative hands-on example to demonstrate the topics covered. Supplemented with on-line materials only available to owners of the book (for example, five chapters on PHP and SQL), the book covers almost everything, although a couple of topics (animation and frames) are available only as freely downloadable chapters from the prior (2004) edition of the book.

The style is less formal than many other books, but the material is covered in depth and accurately, for the most part. Like almost every technical book, the book's first printing does contain a reasonable number of minor errors, so be sure to refer to the author's website and take note of the errata before digging in. The book is printed in black and white with no color plates, but this does not affect its usability at all.

Despite the book's title, this really isn't a "manual" for Dreamweaver -- it's more of a primer. If you're an advanced user looking for a reference volume to provide a quick reference into every picayune detail of Dreamweaver, this isn't your book. This also isn't your book if you're looking for anything other than a first-pass introduction to ASP, PHP, or one of the other server models. But if you're a novice to HTML or a seasoned web designer making the jump from manual coding to the advanced WYSIWYG features of Dreamweaver and need a gentle immersion into the broad power of Dreamweaver 8, this is a great book to use.

For this reason, this is easily my favorite Dreamweaver book.

ADDENDUM (10 Sept. 2006): "Where did the support go?" -- The errata page for the book has not been updated since June. There are more than a few reported errors still outstanding that have not been added to the errata list; I know because I submitted them myself through the O'Reilly website. It appears that support for this title has ended -- or at least that it has been put on the back-burner -- despite Dreamweaver 8 still being the current version. That's particularly disappointing because it's so un-O'Reilly to let mistakes go like this.

Because of the lack of ongoing support, and because I have since discovered some better Dreamweaver books (see my other reviews), I would drop my rating of this book from 5 stars to 4.

ADDENDUM (5 Oct. 2006): The errata page has, finally, been updated. According to the email I received from the publisher, O'Reilly had some issues migrating its errata-tracking system to a new server this summer, causing the long delay. These issues are now resolved, and the errata are appearing regularly again.

44 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thorough book on making the most of Dreamweaver 8, November 23, 2006

By	calvinnme "Texan refugee" (Fredericksburg, Va) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)

Dreamweaver is a complete Web site production and management tool that works with Web technologies like HTML, XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This book provides great insight into using this tool. Along with basic instruction it also has tips I haven't found anywhere else. As you read the book's chapters, there are a number of living examples--step-by-step tutorials that you can build yourself, using raw materials like graphics and half-completed Web pages that you can download from from the web. Simply reading these step-by-step lessons might not gain you much. However, if you take the time to work through the examples at the computer, you'll discover that these tutorials give you unprecedented insight into the way professional designers build Web pages. Also in this book's lessons are the URLs of the finished pages so that you can compare your Dreamweaver work with the final result. In other words, you won't just see pictures of Dreamweaver's output in the pages of the book. You can also find the actual working Web pages on the Internet.

Part One, Building a Web Page, explores Dreamweaver's interface and goes through the basic steps of building a Web page. It explains how to add text and format it, how to link from one page to another, and how to spice up your designs with graphics.

Part Two, Building a Better Web Page, goes deeper into Dreamweaver and explains how to gain greater control of the design of a Web page. It shows how to use more advanced features, such as tables, layers, and Cascading Style Sheets. In addition, there's get step-by-step instructions for creating advanced page layouts, as well as on how to view and work with the underlying HTML code of a page.

Part Three, Bringing Your Pages to Life, discusses adding interactivity to your site. From using forms to collect information from your site's visitors to adding complex JavaScript programs, this section guides the reader through adding animation, multimedia, and other interactive effects with ease.

Part Four, Building a Web Site, covers the big picture including managing the pages and files in a Web site, testing links and pages, and moving a site onto a Web server connected to the Internet. This section also covers features that let you work with a team of Web developers.

Part Five, Dreamweaver Power, shows how to take full advantage of such time-saving features as Libraries, Templates, and History panel automation. It also covers Dreamweaver's Extension Manager, a program that can add hundreds of new free and commercial features to the program.

Part Six, Dynamic Dreamweaver, presents a gentle introduction to the often confusing and complex world of database-driven Web sites. It discusses how to build a dynamic Web site; how to connect Dreamweaver to a database; and how to use Dreamweaver to build pages that can display database information as well as add, edit, and delete database records. The last chapter of this section covers Dreamweaver 8's powerful new XSLT tools for converting XML files (including RSS feeds) into browser-ready Web designs.

At the end of the book, two appendixes provide a list of Internet resources for additional Web design help and a menu-by-menu explanation of Dreamweaver 8. I highly recommend this addition to the Missing Manual series for anyone interested in using and thoroughly understanding the latest version of Dreamweaver. The following is the detailed table of contents:

Part I: Building a Web Page
Chapter 1. Dreamweaver 8 Guided Tour
Chapter 2. Adding Text to Your Web Pages
Chapter 3. Text Formatting
Chapter 4. Links
Chapter 5. Images
Part II: Building a Better Web Page
Chapter 7. Page Layout 101
Chapter 8. Advanced Page Layout
Chapter 9. Under the Hood: HTML
Part III: Bringing Your Pages to Life
Chapter 10. Forms
Chapter 11. Dreamweaver Behaviors
Chapter 12. Flash, Shockwave, and Other Multimedia
Part IV: Building a Web Site
Chapter 13. Introducing Site Management
Chapter 14. Testing Your Site
Chapter 15. Moving Your Site to the Internet
Part V: Dreamweaver Power
Chapter 16. Snippets and Libraries
Chapter 17. Templates
Chapter 18. Automating Dreamweaver
Chapter 19. Customizing Dreamweaver
Part VI: Dynamic Dreamweaver
Chapter 20. Getting Started with Dynamic Web Sites
Chapter 21. Adding Dynamic Data to Your Pages
Chapter 22. Web Pages that Manipulate Database Records
Chapter 23. Advanced Dynamic Site Features
Chapter 24. XML and XSLT
Part VII: Appendixes
Appendix A. Getting Help
Appendix B. Dreamweaver 8, Menu by Menu

53 of 56 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dreamweaver 8 Definitive How-To Guide, February 20, 2006

By	Daniel McKinnon (Tewksbury, MA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)

With over 900 pages of "Missing Manual" goodness, 'Dreamweaver 8: The Missing Manual' just might be the finest book of this series. For the retail price of $44.95, it's incredible that this much information could be contained within. I have written lots of reviews on the line by David Pogue, and I am continually impressed at how well these books are written and laid out. David Sawyer McFarland puts his heart and soul into this book and boy does it show!

From the basics of getting your web site up and running with Dreamweaver to a discussion on CSS to a discussion on page layout to adding dynamic content, this book will take someone who has never made a web page before to becoming a superuser in no time.

If you need to create a web site at your work or you are delving into the world of producing a personal web site, you cannot go wrong if you want to use Dreamweaver to develop your spot on the web. Dreamweaver has been the web development tool of choice for many, many years, and it's no surprise. Version 8 of the popular tool only improves upon everything else that used to be good before and this truly is the manual that SHOULD have been in the box!!

***** HIGHEST POSSIBLE RECOMENDATION