Customer Reviews

The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

As a developer who is modestly adept with PHP, this book is a welcome addition to my library. With the recent release of CS3, it covers the nuts and bolts of the application(s) including the newly introduced Spry Widgets. Being a visual learner, I especially appreciated the chapter entitled "Creating a CSS Site Straight Out of the Box." The instructions were clear and concise and provided a great foundation for building future CSS based sites.

Every chapter, at least for me, was full of "Ah Ha" moments. I think I've learned more from this book than any other I've read in the past year (and there's been plenty). I even figured out how to get PHP My Admin running, thanks to this book! I recommend it highly.

If you are VERY comfortable with PHP and MySQL, this may not be the best book for you. (I say that with some reservations, though, because of the vast wealth of knowledge in this book between page 1 and page 729.) Also, if you don't know how to code in PHP, the "Introduction to the Basics of PHP" in Chapter Ten may not be enough instruction for you to comfortably appreciate this book. BUT, if you have some knowledge of PHP (for example, you are a self-taught PHP coder like myself), need the power of PHP and MySQL, and are curious about any benefits there might be from this new technology SPRY (Adobe's implementation of AJAX), this will be an excellent book for you. The writing is clear, concise (in spite of its detailed explanations), and logical.

The strength of Powers' book is providing you with the vast majority of tools you will need to create, test, and implement a dynamic Web site using the power of PHP, MySQL, SPRY, and more. For instance, Chapter Four has detailed instructions on setting up a PHP server on your hard drive to enable you to test your server-side programs. Those instructions begin with downloading the PHP installation files and end with trouble-shooting possible configuration problems, including all necessary steps in between.

The book continues with how to set up a PHP site using Dreamweaver, learning the rules, tips, and benefits of cascading style sheets (CSS), the advantages and creation of a SPRY navigation menu bar, and an in-depth examination of on-line forms and data validation. Since the next logical step is doing something with the form data, the MySQL database product is tackled beginning, again, with its installation, continuing with the use of the phpMyAdmin feature, and ending with the storage of database records (including access control and security issues). As if this was not enough information to digest, the book ends with a guide to and uses for XML and XSLT in your Web site.

One more big plus from this book is that it offers the code (tested and commented) for a number of commonly used functions on Web sites today. If you are looking for a login function, form validation function, mail function, (and the list goes on) you'll find the code in this book.

Again, there is a wealth of knowledge in this book from front cover to back cover - well organized and easy to grasp.

A fabulous book so easy to follow and informative.
This brings Dreamweaver to today and has dropped completely the outdated use of tables that others (such as H.O.T.) seem to be stuck with when the industry trend is only to insert tables into a page when using excel spreadsheets and such and never to use them for page building.
The extensive introduction of Widgets is a delight and has completely replaced those Javascript drop menu's avoiding all the pitfalls they entailed. The author leads you into dreamweaver in the usual way, most of these titles use, then easily run through tutorials that demonstrate how to build a site from simple CSS templates and from scratch. Step by step the author leads one from simple site to the introduction of widgets (new to DW CS3) through to PHP pages and on to databases and includes.
Very easy to folow and brings one up to date on the new CS3 architecture.

As the author says, "this book isn't 'Dreamweaver CS3 for the Clueless', or 'Dreamweaver CS3 for Complete Beginners'". There are plenty of books flooding the market at the moment for those users, and if that's you, I recommend you look elsewhere.

This book is intended for those who are familiar with the basics of web development with an interest in PHP, CSS, Ajax and Spry (Adobes version of Ajax). It assumes that you know your way around Dreamweaver, but that you haven't developed database driven web applications before.

As a tutorial, it is undoubtedly excellent. The author has a light and friendly writing style which works really well with this book, and he rapidly takes you from 'newbie' status to becoming an experienced developer.

As a reference book, it doesn't quite work - but I don't think that was the intention anyway. There is no 200-page index at the back listing all possible PHP and MySQL commands, but the book is all the better for it. If you need reference material, it's free on the web anyway, and personally I don't like books which use such an underhand method of giving me 'quantity' over 'quality'. This Essential Guide is exactly, and just, that.

Just one word about support. Not a word you normally associate with books, but David Powers is very active on the Adobe Dreamweaver forums, and always happy to assist readers (and others!) with any PHP-related questions. Just knowing that makes me confident about buying future books written by him.

As can be gleaned from the long title, this is an ambitious book. In almost 800 pages, David Powers overviews a wide array of technologies that can be used to build highly dynamic Web sites. The focus of the book is Dreamweaver CS3, the newest iteration of the leading Web development software from Adobe (formerly from Macromedia). After Adobe acquired Macromedia, it released Dreamweaver CS3, which incorporated the Spry framework--a library of code for creating AJAX applications. The book examines these changes, and provides demonstrations on creating Web sites using these new tools and making them work with other Web-related technologies such as PHP, CSS, XML and relational databases. Sample code is provided on the publisher's Website.

The first chapter highlights changes to Dreamweaver including Device Central and Adobe Bridge. Device Central is a feature that allows developers to preview what pages look like in handheld devices such as cell phones. Bridge is a program included with CS3 that manages images, multimedia and many other types of resources. Chapter 2 explores Spry effects, which provide ways to shake, squish, fade and otherwise manipulate elements on a Web page. Chapters 3 and 4 show readers how to create a local testing environment and how to set up Dreamweaver to work with PHP.

Chapters 5 and 6 detail CS3's support for CSS. This is helpful for those who, like myself, have written CSS by hand and have neglected support provided by Dreamweaver. The tools for handling CSS include the ability to drag page-specific styles to an external stylesheet and the ability to easily see which style rules affect a particular element on a page by using the CSS Styles panel. This section also discusses using CSS layout designs supplied by Adobe.

The next three chapters begin an in-depth exploration of various Spry widgets, code that allows a user to easily create fly-out menus, tabbed and "accordion" style interfaces, and other "oh, wow!" effects. Chapters 9 through 12 introduce PHP and discuss how to use it to send form results in an e-mail, validate user input, and include external files in a PHP page.

The next five chapters discuss setting up Dreamweaver CS3 to work with a MySQL database administered by the phpMyAdmin program. The chapters also discuss access control using PHP sessions and storing and retrieving data using PHP and the MySQL RDBMS.

Chapter 18 discusses using Dreamweaver and XSLT to display XML documents in a Web page. It also provides a brief introduction to XPath, the language that allows coders to find information in an XML document.

Chapters 19 and 20 are likely to be the most interesting for seasoned Web developers because they introduce Spry's support for dynamically displaying XML documents using AJAX. This feature allows developers to quickly create photo albums, calendars and other applications that can display new information on a Web page without reloading the page. The chapters also discuss how to retrieve information from various sources including an RBDMS.

In all, this is an ambitious book--perhaps too ambitious at times. Those without a basic foundation in the technologies discussed will likely find themselves occasionally lost. It also suffers from a few organizational problems. Certain chapters feel a bit thrown together, with disparate elements competing for the reader's attention.

However, the author does a good job of going beyond the Dreamweaver manual and showing the user how Dreamweaver can be used to build real-world Web applications. He also does a good job of explaining Spry's (and AJAX's) dark side--the complexity and size of the code, poor or non-existent accessibility for the impaired, and the requirement that JavaScript be enabled on the user's browser. He helpfully suggests workarounds for these issues.

I have read many books on programming. While I have gleaned some value from just about every book, the page-count-to-learning ratio hasn't been great. And on a few occasions, I hit a roadblock where I simply wasn't getting what author was telling me I should be completely proficient with at that moment...anyone else experience that?? Makes me feel like a coloring-by-the-numbers code monkey. I've gone back to some of those books once I have gained some proficiency on the topic (elsewhere) to find that those authors made things unnecessarily complex. Who knows why, but it sure pisses me off.

I give you this background, so that when I say that this book is absolutely without equal in delivering actionable, easy-to-understand content on almost every single page, that is no exaggeration. I lost count of the number of times I came up with a question, only to read the very next sentence which usually went something like this, "...you are probably wondering why this is the case. Here's why..." It was incredible! And the exercises start to ween you off of the minutia at precisely the right pace (for me, anyway). It was a great confidence builder when the author wrote, "You should be comfortable with these steps at this point..." and I totally was.

Truly excellent work by David Powers and Tom Muck (who did the technical review). And they've kept their errata/updates site up-to-date with DW CS3, which definitely came in handy as I encountered current-version discrepancies with things like Spry 1.6.

One miss was, the very last exercise did not work for me. After thoroughly reviewing the sample code, my code, etc. I submitted it as errata...waiting for a response.

it is an excellent book. I'm not sure what exactly I actually expected from a book that has Dreamweaver, CSS, AJAX ad PHP (and MySQL) in its title. But one thing is for sure - this book is truly great because this book does something that a lot of other technical books do not do - it teaches you to use several technologies in a chronological way, by adding functionality to the same web site. You do not learn things by following many unrelated examples, but rather by following a step by step instructions which will lead you to the final product - a functional dynamic web site. I find this system of teaching to be the best, because it shows you the actual process of implementation of the techniques and technologies and how they work together on the same page. Teach by example. But beware, that this concept of teaching does not exactly explain the why's, but rather concentrates on the how's giving real world examples without pushing the reader to use a certain approach only to later explain why that particular approach was bad and show a good one.
Although this book is intended for beginners in programming, some of the stuff was rather hard to comprehend and you certainly should not entirely rely on this book alone and seek some more examples on the subject, just to give you more clarity. And you certainly should know your way around Dreamweaver. The author will give you a quick overview of the work environment and CSS, but this is not the book you want if you can't work with Dreamweaver at least at the upper beginner level. That applies to your knowledge of CSS too.
This is not a quick study book. You will see immediate results, but to understand what is going on and be able to use the knowledge to make your own applications will require a lot of determination and effort on your part. I personally like that - no pain, no gain. However, if you have the will to go through a lot of coding, reading, looking for that missing semi-colomn in your code and do not want to be bothered by childish examples and exercises, your perseverance will be awarded and this book will make you a better web developer. It's 5 stars and a big THANK YOU MR POWERS from me.

This is a purchase that I regret. :-( I was quite disappointed by the misleading title. The book contains decent coverage of Dreamweaver for beginners. The book is not quite a tutorial but it is definitely not a comprehensive reference.

The book covers how to do basics in Spry. Spry is the AJAX framework bundled in Dreamweaver. There is no depth in the writing on Spry, and the coverage of RESTful and AJAX is minimal. The same can be said for the treatment of PHP. The coverage of PHP is superficial. There's no practical guidance on how to use PHP in Dreamweaver application development.

Two is harsh, because this is an average book and it probably merits a 3 but for the misleading title. However, I can't bring myself to mark it as a 2 because the author saw a way to sell copies. Returning to Dreamweaver after missing a couple releases, I found "Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual" to be a more complete book, and while it also covers Spry and a bit of PHP it makes no pretensions about its focus.

This book is extremely well set out. As a newbie to the design trade I have found other text assume so much.
This publication is based on the assumption of limited knowledge and guide the reader through each step. Bit by bit. But it doesn't stop at basic knowledge, it takes you through to advanced methods and give you more resources to learn more.
It's my bible.

I settled on this book after reading all the great reviews, and I'm glad I did! Clear instructions and an accessible style really make this a valuable guide. After years of thinking "I wish I knew how to do that!", I worked through the exercises in this book and within a week and a half I was able to put my first database-driven, content-managed website online. I now have a firmer grasp on CSS and will never again go back to my 1990's web design habits.