Customer Reviews

Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(1)
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I have never been tempted to take the time to write one of these online reviews until I read this book. It's been so helpful to me in my work and has saved me so many hours of unnecessary labor that I thought I ought to tell people about it.

I've got lots of these kinds of books - from the dummy books to the huge bibles - but Dreamweaver:The Missing Manual is leagues better than any of them!

By the first few pages, I knew that this book would be fabulous, and it is. I like it because it is written for an intelligent reader, yet it uses non-techy language. Plus, there are lots of humorous references, which makes reading it fun.

Importantly, it doesn't assume technical knowledge on the part of the reader. It explains the whys along with the hows. This is of utmost value to me - I find the "whys" missing in many books. Often, a tutorial will say, "Do this. Then do this. Then do this." Well, any monkey can follow 1,2,3 instructions, but if you don't know WHY you're doing something, you won't be able to apply it to something else later on. I am constantly frustrated by that. I wanted more than a beginner's book, but I wanted the complex stuff explained in simple language. This book does that.

I started to bookmark the pages where I learned something valuable and realized I was marking the whole damned book - that's the type of book this is.

Other reviewers seem to think this book is fabulous, too, but only for beginners. Yet within the first two chapters, I found two tips that will save me far more than the purchase price. As a designer of online training courses, I became a fan of Dreamweaver years ago, when Macromedia added Coursebuilder, which makes it easy to add tests to your website. So I was among the first to upgrade to version 4.0. While there is much to love in the upgrade, one frustration was the handy little button on the Object panel that inserted Break tags -- HTML coding that skips you to the next line without leaving a blank line in between. I remember wasting an hour under deadline looking for it, finally settling for the keyboard shortcut. But there in McFarland's book, not only do I find out where it is hidden, but I learn about other goodies I had never spotted before. Yes, indeed, I want more about SSI -- but that's why I hope McFarland write's a follow-up. And, yes, there are things like the DW FTP function that are awful -- but that's Macromedia's fault, not the author's. If all the other books in the Missing Manual series are as good as this, I will need to add a new bookshelf.

DreamWeaver 4: The Missing Manual is a book that is easy to follow and gives many great examples of how to perform various tasks using DreamWeaver (DW). As a novice DW user (but not at web design), I found the tutorials to be very helpful in learning more about this complex product. Among the topics covered? Basics like text fomatting, adding links, and images. The book's second part goes into more advanced subjects like Tables, Frames, and Cascading Style Sheets.

It also explains forms and inserting JavaScript into your code, as well as incorporating other types of media (like Flash & ShockWave) into your file. There were certain items I'd seen in web site code done in DW that I'd never understood and thanks to this book, I certainly do now.

If you're a novice (like me) or even an intermediate DW user, this book is well worth having not only to learn more but to keep as a handy reference.

This is an excellent book if you have no experience with Dreamweaver. Takes you through everything step by step, and that is both a strength and a weakness. If you already know HTML and perhaps have worked with a package like FrontPage, alot of this book will be too basic and you will just skim. Then, when you want the real nitty gritty inside tips, you may have to go to a diffent source. This is a great manual, especially if you did a web purchase of Dreamweaver and didn't get a manual, but it doesn't go much beyond that.

The book reads like a story book! It is very well written and quite comphrensive. The book is far far better than the other high priced glossy books on Dreamweaver. The book has a companion web site for tutorial files and much more.

My only concern is that if the authors of the 'missing manual' series keep writing such good quality books, the software companies may altogether stop publishing user manuals!

This is book is very easy to follow. Although I am only half way through the book, it really goes into a lot of detail, is very easy to follow and the tutorials are strong. I suggest this book to both beginners and intermediates.

"Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual" is a good guide for beginners, but what I expected was the opposite, a guide for advanced users. I thought it would contain information _missing_ from the official manual. Instead, it contains less information than the manual.

This book provide a quite comprehensive guide for web developer who want to know more features of Dreamweaver. Although lack of samples, this book still gives a valuable advantages for your web development skills.

As a HTML/CSS freak that had enough of FP and migrated to DW, this book provided plenty assistance, and I would recommend it to other novice users that are willing to learn DW. However I must point out my dissapointment that there was no coverage of SSI(server side includes) what so all, and it's misleading concept of the Library/Template function. Yes, the "update library items" updates your site in one click indeed---the local site, that is. Considering the uploading one has to deal with(not to mention the dreadful DW FTP) AFTER the local site is fully effected, this is definetly not what I could 'sit back and smile' at. Otherwise, nice book.