Customer Reviews

FrontPage 2000: The Complete Reference

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I had built a number of web sites using native HTML and one using FP2000 intuitively, without any books to follow. My impression of FP2000 at that time was that it was a little bit like Geocities -- quick and dirty, easy templates, that's it.

Then, a client insisted that I build his business site using FP2000. At that point, I bought this book and started using it. The book was a MAJOR eye-opener about the capabilities of FP2000, and I was like a kid in a candy store while building that site -- largely because of this book!

The book is easy to read (I actually read it cover-to-cover, all 930 pages), although there is definitely a major jump in difficulty when the section on ASP begins.

There's no doubt in my mind that this book is worth every one of the five stars I awarded it. The places where I had minor problems with it were trivial compared with the help it offered. To show how trivial they were, here were my MAJOR problems with the book: (1)I found the discussions of IP addressing (127.0.0.n and 10.0.0.n on pages 815 and 891) somewhat contradictory. (2)I use a lot of Adobe Acrobat stuff on my sites, and was disappointed not to see even an index entry for that extremely common medium. In fact, it would have been nice if they had acknowledged more of the sources of content that many, many people use -- like Paint Shop Pro. (3) It was a little annoying that all books recommended for further reading were those published by McGraw Hill -- even when a book published by, say, O'Reilly is THE authoritative book on a subject. (However, that's typically not the author's fault, usually it's the fault of a publisher who gets a little greedy.)

Summary: if you're thinking about building a web site in FP2000, you should get this book. If you build web sites and you think FP2000 isn't worth considering for building serious web sites, you REALLY should get this book. The book, and my experience with it, actually convinced me to convert some of the native HTML sites I built and still maintain to FP2000 to make the maintenance task easier.

Front Page 2000 The Complete Reference, is not just a reference book. I am starting to build up my domain name Compufly.com So I decided to get the book. The first day I read 287 pages of it (very VERY unlike me) I am computer literate person with the most basic skills of web publishing and this book is really going to do a lot for me. Everything that I could ever question about FP2000 is in here. I highly reccomend this book.

I'm a beginning user of Front Page 2000, and was having some problems filling in the gaps of Microsoft's official publications, so I bought this book. While somewhat comprehensive, there are some key areas that are lacking.

1. There is no section, and virtually no mention of cross-browser compatibility. This was a significant problem I was having, as my pages looked fine to me, but AOL & Netscape users were seeing crazy fonts, strange tables, etc. This book assumes that everyone uses Internet Explorer.

2. It just skims the surface of the intricacies of using tables, which are used extensively in web pages.

3. I found the format somewhat annoying, in that anytime you looked up a feature, instead of just explaining how it works in detail, it makes you build a web page using that feature in order to see it. This is very time consuming when you're just looking for simple answers.

4. The "Free CD of software" is pretty much worthless. All it contains is free and shareware easily found on the web, and in more currrent versions.

5. Some simple things are just simply missing. I wanted to know how to make thumbnails of my photos using Front Page's auto-thumbnail feature. I could find no mention of this anywhere in the index or TOC. It may be in this thick volume somewhere, but I could never find it.

It does contain a ton of information, just not as "Complete" a reference as I would have hoped.

I bought this book on the recommendation of a friend and I must say that in most respects he was right. I have used this book for about six months and I have to say that it has served me well all this time. The book does a great job at explaining clearly and concisely all the steps and other related information about FrontPage. I would not only recommend this book for beginners but also for advanced user that needs in-depth information to create advanced web sites in FrontPage. It has been a very useful resource that I would recommend for anyone that is looking a reference book for Microsoft FrontPage.

Although FrontPage comes with a very good tutorial, the tutorial alone will not be enough to teach you much past using shared borders and themes and how to add links.

This book is definitely the next step - perfect for someone who wants to build more than just the generic homepage with a few graphics and links. This book touches on effective design, spends considerable time on how to use Microsoft Image Composer to make your own graphics and breezes through using Microsoft PhotoDraw to make buttons and bars. It covers how to design with and use tables and frames and how to tie a database to your web site. And this is just the beginning.

From what I can tell so far, it also gives me enough information to help me make intelligent decisions about what I need out of a web server and other higher level functions. It even covers multiple ways to perform the same functions like adding advertising and contrasts the pros and cons. In the example of adding advertising, it shows you how to use the ASP Ad Rotator Component and then how to use the built in FrontPage Banner Ad Manager to do the same thing. It even goes into Java a little and tells you where you can download toolkits to build your own applets. It even tells you how to create your own RealAudio Files and discusses building e-commerce sites.

This is possibly one of the best resource books I have ever purchased and highly recommend this to anyone who needs to find answers quickly.

I picked up this book because I'm going back to China to work on web sites. I've used Frontpage 98 before, but Frontpage 2000 is complex. This book is excellent! It has everything on Frontpage. I've read it once already and will read the good chapters (ASP, database) again on the plane. I already know everything about Fp 2000!

Bought this book after talking to the first reviewer. This is indeed an excellent book, because it tells you everything about FrontPage. Information is complete and precise, no space is wasted. I think it's a "must-have" book if you use frontpage.

The price could be lower...

OK, so the book doesn't really deserve a 3. I just wanted to vent. Is it just me, or did anyone else find the (non)treatment of how Personal Web Server works maddening. The authors state that they assume throughout the book that the reader will have PWS running. Fair enough...but how about a little more detail on how to make that happen! At least a mention somewhere, anywhere, that the Front Page Server Extensions need to be installed on PWS (that setup doesn't handle that little detail) would have been helpful! I spent 2 hours on the Microsoft web trying to figure that one out. And maybe just a few words on how PWS behaves, what web folders really are, all that basic stuff. Anyway, I hope the remaining 800 pages are a litlle more "newbie" friendly.

I couldn't give this book a 5 because I found some things missing, and describing almost everything from a personal web server standpoint isn't helpful to people with disk based Webs. I do, however, consider it to be the best one that I've read, and I've been through quite a few.

The information that they provided on Meta tags and site submission I could not find in any other FrontPage book, only in books dealing entirely with HTML. I think this info alone makes it worth buying, especially for a novice. For the more advanced people, the Java and related info was very good.

This book, along with Running FrontPage 2000, and the Getting Started manual that comes with FrontPage should be about all you need.

FrontPage 2000: The Complete Reference is one of the better FrontPage book I have come across, the reason for an average rating is that the book has holes with in it. It presumes that everything is configured correctly, Personal Web Server, Server Extensions, etc If the book covered possible solutions to common problems it would be better. The only other gripe I had way the use of the words "relatively simple process" when it was not.