Customer Reviews

GoLive 6 Magic (Magic (New Riders))

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I confess that I'm a fellow author of an Adobe GoLive book, and I love this title. Why? Because it offers long, detailed, masterful tutorials on some of the most complex and underdocumented features in GoLive that can also be incredibly powerful, especially for increasing efficiency and flexibility. GoLive 6 Magic lets your creativity get further unleashed by removing the restriction of relying on your own smarts to learn the most advanced features in the program.

I was relieved to read GoLive 6 Magic because it's the graduation present for our readers: many topics on which we can touch briefly or offer a simple overview are presented across several pages with illustrations and accompanying examples on CD-ROM.

You learn not only how to use advanced graphics tools, but how to modify GoLive Actions (plug-in JavaScripts) and build rich dynamic content.

Far be it from me to suggest you buy both this book and my book, but they're a nice complement to each other. If you've sucked the marrow dry of beginner and intermediate sources, buy this book: it'll help you master the rest of the program.

Great book for Golive users who want to go to the next level.

Golive is a very powerful web authoring program and Golive 6 Magic is very good in showing some of the features that I might have never duscovered on my own.

Text macros, Quicktime and Flash sniffer techniques, creating Quicktime sprites and skins, cool DHTML projects (I like the online calender), authoring your own javascript actions, getting into the SDK, setting up your own Dynamic database content management system with PHP and MySQL are some of the 14 projects included.

There is a companion CD that has all the data for Golive 6 to use when you follow along with the book.

Some of the projects seemed a bit intimidating to an intermediate user like myself, but the book is layed out so clearly that it was fun to delve into the projects.

I have set up my own MySQL,PHP database for the first time thanks to Golive 6 magic ( a sample database is included).

This is a needed addition to the Golive library.

If you use Adobe Golive to create web sites and want to dig deeper into the powerful program, this book will help you do it.

It has 14 projects, along with a companion CD (contains all the necessary data to use in Golive), that will increase your knowledge of Golive and help you to create more advanced web sites.

Creating and using text macros, authoring your own javascript actions,
very cool dhtml projects (I really like the online calender), authoring wireless handheld web sites, and setting up your own dynamic content management system using PHP and MySQL (with a sample database included).

Some of the projects may seem a bit intimidating to intermediate users like myself, but when I went thru the book,I found that it is layed out so clearly that it became fun to delve into the projects.

I am setting up the PHP and mySQL Dynamic link as I write and I have never done it before!

A very cool and needed addition to the Golive library.

Having been a little disappointed at some of the material that Adobe's own _GoLive 6 Classroom In A Book_left out, I decided it was maybe time to take a look at something that assumed the user already knew the basics of what they were doing and wanted to really get to the juicy stuff.

GoLive 6 Magic fits the bill perfectly (which came as a pleasant surprise after reading some other titles in this series which were pretty to look at but not much more). There's a lot of good stuff in here, and it's well worth a look if you've found some of the other available titles rather skimpy in their coverage of advanced stuff.

So what's in it? Fourteen chapters in total, covering a wide range of subjects. I'll admit that a couple were of no interest to me (those on WAP and i-mode site development) so I can't really comment on the quality of those. I also found the inclusion of a couple of Quicktime-oriented chapters a little strange, although interesting enough.

Where the book really shines is in its coverage of GoLive's support of dynamic HTML through Actions - not only do the examples show to to perform certain simple (but general enough to expand on) tasks using what's provided, but there's also excellent material on creating your own Actions too.

On top of this the book also has a couple of chapters that deal with GoLive's SDK, showing how you can expand the tool itself relatively easily - both chapters make use of GoLive's ability to write extensions in JavaScript using the built-in editor/debugger too, so the techniques shown here are potentially of use to anyone who owns the tool, and not just those who happen to have the appropriate C or C++ development environment installed.

The remaining two chapters cover the use and customization of GoLive's text macro capabilities - useful if not exactly rocket-science - and the use of the dynamic content/data source binding tools. The latter chapter covers the setting up of a simple news site and the creation of pages for maintaining said site, and it's clear and straightforward.

However, it did confirm for me my growing disappointment in the support in both GoLive 6 and its primary competitor, Dreamweaver MX, for PHP as a scripting language. Both tools restrict their built-in support for PHP to the MySQL database, and for anything more complex than very simple databases, using the built-in tools for the PHP/MySQL combination becomes unwieldy pretty rapidly. Until MySQL supports views and stored procedures, or GoLive and Dreamweaver support the combination of PHP and (say) PostgreSQL, I'm going to continue hand-coding my database-driven pages.

That shouldn't really reflect on the book though - it covers the capabilities as they currently exist clearly, and if you get to the point where you need to add multiple content sources per-page, each based around a complex SQL query, you'll be aware of the shortcomings of what's provided anyway.

In summary, a readable book with plenty of screen images to show what's going on, and a lot of very useful information that'll be appreciated by the advanced user, and encourage/enable the intermediate user to *become* an advanced user.

The GoLive 6 Magic book from New Riders looks like a miniature coffee table art book. It contains 244 pages and a CD. I was struck by the beautiful black & white photos of nature at the beginning of each chapter and the multitude of screen shots. The introduction states that Adobe® GoLive 6 is an extremely powerful and easy to use visual web authoring tool popular with high level designers and graphic artists while also empowering web novices and advanced users alike. The author assumes that the reader of this book probably already knows the basics of GoLive but wants to go on to the next level. You want to know about multimedia, creating actions and extensions, building dynamic web sites and coding for hand held devices and more. There are also many time saving tips, tricks, and real-world solutions in the book. More and more people are using hand held devices to access the web and so you have to take into consideration that particular i-Mode. You can test your site on different i-Mode devices (via emulation software) to render the graphical and text content.

GoLive 6 Magic was especially timely for me because our User Group web site is being remodeled. Two of the new features we want to incorporate are included in the book: collapsible DHTML menus using ID actions and creating an action to display random images. Collapsible menus afford you to display many items in a limited space. When you roll over a main menu item, it displays a sub-menu of more items with links.

The CD contains all the necessary files to perform the various customizable exercises as well as demo versions of related software. The CD opens by double-clicking. I tried the exercise to create collapsible DHTML menus with sub-menus using ID actions. Wow! It was so easy. The book walks you step by step through each project and also displays an accompanying screen shot. I set up the CSS files (Cascading Style Sheets) once and customized my font display. This is better than doing each link one at a time. I used a font family such as: Arial, Helvetica, Geneva and SunSans Regular. Although you can assign any font on your computer to a CSS style, your page's viewers can only see the fonts installed on their computers. You tailor your web page so that all the fonts look good on the page. If the viewer does not have Arial on his computer, it will default to Helvetica if installed and so on. A web designer stays with the fonts that most everyone has installed on both platforms. Well, the project turned out just as it was supposed to and it was easy besides. Besides tips there also were explanations for why you do a certain thing. I'm sold, this book is a definite winner!

If you want to take GoLive a few steps further then this is the book for you. Though this book is not for the novice GoLive user, as somone who considers himself in the intermediate/advanced user category I found it very useful indeed. My biggest problem was installing the Dynamic Content Servers from the GoLive CD so that I could work through the "Building a Dynamic Content Management System using PHP and MySQL" Project!

Author Paul Vachier brings in "GoLive Superstars" such as Rob Keniger as contributors to great advantage.

I have really enjoyed working through the tutorials which are very well edited. Often I get frustrated with books like these because I find that the text does not always match up with the practical steps to be taken. However in GoLive 6 Magic they matched very well indeed. I actually had fun doing it. And now after working through "Creating Quicktime Sniffers" to "Displaying Random Images and URLs" to "Building Dynamic Content" and the other 11 tutorials I think that I am a much more skilled user. What more can I ask?

I've had this book since it was released and it really helped my learn how to use GoLive 6 as I already know how to do web pages and such. Having used Dreamweaver for many years, the way GoLive works is completely different and this book was a good guide on figuring out how to get what I wanted done, done.

GoLive 6 Magic is an excellent book for those who wants to learn a bit more about GoLive than the basics and wants to go on to a deeper understanding and knowledge about what can be done with Adobe GoLive 6 and how to do it.

The projects in the book are easy to follow and understand and really useful.
I recommend it warmly to anyone who works in GoLive and have done so for some time.

It is not a beginners book and you have to know the basics of GoLive to fully appreciate it. But if you do, this is a must have book as it covers a lot of things that are not in the manual or the Help-file.

Paul, Rob, and company have written a really fantastic book that explores the more advanced features of GoLive 6. As the co-author of another GoLive book (SAMS Teach Yourself GoLive 6 in 24 Hours) I highly recommend this book if you want to take GoLive to the next level!

As someone who uses GoLive regularly but uses only the basic aspects of the program, GoLive 6 Magic was a great tool to teach myself some of the deeper level capabilities of GoLive 6. The only thing that I think is missing is a glossary. The book is clear and easy to follow, with a CD and neat projects that can easily be applied to your own designs. As an artist, I particularly enjoyed the book's eye candy. It's a beautiful book. It feels cutting edge not only in the information offered but in the way that the authors collaborate and show readers who they are.