Customer Reviews

Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 Hands-On Training

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have some HTML experience (typing code manually, not using a program) but it has been several years since I needed to use it. When the need arose again, I purchased Dreamweaver, but I didn't know how to use it. Thanks to this training manual, I am well on my way!

This manual starts in the beginning and assumes the reader knows very little or nothing about web design. That will make it incredibly easy for an extreme novice to learn. By far, the best part of this training is the hands-on approach. Most people don't truly learn how to do something unless they actually do it, so this is a perfect approach for something as complex as web design.

There are a few things this book is not, so I'll list some. This is not a manual for advanced WYSIWYG web designers. This is not a book for JavaScript coding or any other advanced element. This is a wonderful book if you are just learning or not very proficient with Dreamweaver and want to learn more, but it would not be for advanced users.

The CD comes complete with all files necessary to recreate sample web sites by following the written instructions in the book and videos on the CD. Years ago when I designed sites just with hand-typed HTML, I thought little of those who "cheated" and used programs to help them design. But now I see the difference! By using Dreamweaver, you can be a novice designer and still create a dazzling dynamic site in a fraction of the time that it would take an expert designer who hand-typed code! This book will get you well on your way!

Highly recommended!

This book is aimed at someone new to using Dreamweaver and starts with the basics in chapters 1-5 (Interface, Site Control, Creating Documents, Inserting Text and Images, Linking) and moving on to various subjects including Cascading Style Sheets, Typography, Tables, Layout, Rollovers, Forms, Behaviors, Templates and Library Items in chapters 6-16.

My two main problems with this book are:
1) The Diagrams are not clearly labeled to make the lessons easy to follow. Trying to find where a button or menu selection in a window is located is not easy when you've never used a program before. More pictures showing exactly where you will find what is being talked about in the text is essential for a visual tutorial. There are some pictures, just not enough. The book "How To Wow Photoshop CS2 For the Web" does a good job of this.

Problem 2) The book does not attempt to cover common situations where the student might not be seeing on their screen what is pictured in the book. Especially in a program like Dreamweaver where there are many windows, menus, panels, etc that need to be managed, it's easy to miss (or not see) something. A good tutorial book anticipates that a beginner might make a mistake and will have a paragraph that says something like... "If you don't see the X option, it's because you don't have the Y tool selected."

Another area that I had a problem with is the order of the material presented. The chapter "Layout" does not come until the middle of the book, after the chapters on CSS and "Tables". And the author did not give a good sense of which was the best way to go about putting a layout together: CSS, Tables or Table Layouts. The author could have given a better idea of what is the best workflow when starting a site. The topic of "templates" and "libraries" does not come until the end of the book. But to me it was confusing since it seems like you should be aware of these things before you start a site since you'll want to take advantage of templates and library items in your site. Also, an idea of how to incorporate Photoshop with Dreamweaver layouts would have been useful. There are many gaps that the reader will have to figure out by themselves.

The tutorials in this book were not easy to follow. Is it because Dreamweaver is a difficult program to use? I'm not sure. Based on my experience with this book, I can't recommend it. As of this review: the book "Dreamweaver 8 Training From the Source" has not come out, but I am going to give that one a try next.

This is certainly one of the better teach-yourself books out there, but it still lacks that last coat of polish. Also, you'll need somebody to answer your questions, and those questions will turn up!

Some things that newbies, like me, will encounter include:
* If you get out of synch with the step by step procedures, it can be very difficult to get back. Other folks in our class noticed this, too, as well as other Amazon reviewers.
* The book is usually good at explaining what you're doing and why, but not always. The "not always" parts can derail your understanding.
* Their terminology is sometimes sloppy. For example, they often write "click and drag" when they really mean just "drag." Their definitions of rollover states also fail to communicate clearly.
* Their instructions don't always make sense on a Mac. For example, their incantations to bring up a browser to review your work don't function as published, and they tell you that you don't have to save your work, but on my Mac, you do have to save your work to see it in the browser.
* The text doesn't make sense when you go back weeks later to look something up, it only makes sense when you've just finished an exercise. On CSS rollovers, for example, instead of the book telling you what effects you specified and how they worked, the book just says, "The buttons... look fantastic."

If you have an outside source to answer your questions, this book can be wonderful. If you're on your own, plan on getting stuck a few times along the way.

The book's pretty good as it stands, I've learned a ton from it and the exercises are well-conceived. Give this book one more revision, and hopefully most of my criticisms will have been addressed. Excellence is within reach.

After returing another book that I bought on the same subject; I love this book. The layout is 'hands on' and you learn by creating a fake business website that focuses on tea. Provides all of the resources for the fake site on a cd as well as video and practice files for each chapter. Anyway, I'm not even done with the book and the amount that I've learned is mind boggling. I'm a beginner to dreamweaver and the book does wonders. Of course you have to be familiar with windows though...that's a given.

Before I picked up this book, I had no experience with dreamweaver whatsoever, and basic html skills (I can read html and know what it is.

When flipping through the pages, I noticed that the pictures were in color! Not only that, the layout of the lessons made it easy and fun to read! This book taught me the basics with dreamweaver (how to make forms, website, and etc. efficiently)

The only thing I "bad" about this book is that it is a short read; I bought it 2 days ago and I am almost finished, but its probably because the book is layed-out so well or most of it was easy to me.

I would definately recommend it to anyone with no experience in dreamweaver.

I was taking an entry-level course on DW 8 at the community college and they listed this book as the required text book. I have no idea why, because the instructor never referred to it and just did his own thing. But I have learned more from the book on my own than I did from the class. Of special merit are the video tutorials that come on the cd. As you complete the exercises in each chapter, there is supplementary related material presented in video form on the cd.

The only problem is that you learn to build the particular tea-selling website that is being built in the book. While 75% of the materials is either applicable or of possible interest, there is still this 25% gap of knowledge that leaves you stranded when you are faced with the prospect of staring at a blank project of your own and putting your own content in it. I may know how to insert the file that the author created from his folder to his page, but how do I create my own file to insert in my own page?

[..]

There is no substitute for hands-on experience, and I have obviously not been gifted with intuitive knowledge of web principles. I constantly manage to get myself into situations where what I do just plain doesn't work, but no book (or library of books) can prepare you for the challenges you will face trying to implement your own ideas in the real world. But this one comes fairly close.

Dreamweaver is a deceptively simple-appearing program, but is incredibly powerful and complex "under the hood". Thus, future users will need exceptionally well-prepared materials to learn it well.

This book is an excellent start, with numerous tutorials and videos, but the reader will definitely need additional materials.

Lynda.com is quite well resepected for its tutorials, and rightly so, though I personally find them rather dry (in comparison with the Total Training series). Author Daniel Short, while undeniably a talented, skilled and capable instructor, has a voice that could be bottled and sold as a prescription-strength sedative.

The book is an ideal supplement to the Lynda.com series, and could even be considered critical to adequately grasping Dreamweaver, but the section on CSS falls seriously short in conveying understanding to the neophyte.

I do recommend this book (even highly), but hope that Mr. Short and Lynda.com can address these shortcomings.

OK, so I'm half-way through Chapter 15 and this book frustrates me. I'm on a Mac, so that offsets the instructions by one jog. It doesn't help, either, when Mac instructions are given incorrectly, or not given at all.

Most of my software learning has been from books, not classes. This is my first experience of being able to follow exercises, but then not being able to work on my own. There is no sense of where to begin to build a practice site. For my style of learning, it is not helpful to be shown one way to do something, then to be told, "Don't do it that way. Here's a better way."

I'll work the lessons through to the end even though the time spent feels partially wasted. Then, I'll try another book.

I would not recommend this book to others.

Having been through a fair number of training manuals for software, what I find is most important is a logical path that would be typical for an everyday user to experience. After a very informative and hands on introduction to features and layout, that's exactly what Mr. Short does. The step by step procedures provide a hands on approach to actually doing a particular task and the explanation clarifies why you are doing it this way. It is often the explanation that is missing or unclear in manuals and other books and the explanation is what is actually teaching you versus just being told what procedure to use without any explanation.

If anything was mis-leading it is in the title. In place of "Training" I would have suggested "Learning". I see training as someone being told that certain steps need to be followed to get from point A to point B without any idea why this is so. Learning is understanding the how and why.

I would not hesitate to buy other books by Daniel Short as he has displayed a through understanding of the subject and has a clear method of expalaining this for the lay person as well as someone familiar with the basics.

Perfect for beginners, each step is explained thoroughly with many illustrations to assist the reader. Tremendous amount of information, easy for reader to move from beginner to highly proficient in Dreamweaver 8 program using this book.