Customer Reviews

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Unleashed

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

 

 

I am an intermediate level website developer. I thought this would be an great book. When I received it the first thing I did was turn to the chapter on embedding Flash videos. I quickly discovered that 9 out of 10 figures/screenpics in the chapter were for the wrong topic! It is the most error filled book I have ever bought. Even the website listed as the books "support" site is for a different company! I have bought hundreds of books over the last decade. This is the first one I have ever returned because it was so poorly proofread. Also, the publisher has no "errata" site, and did not return my email asking for help. Matt

This book is the perfect choice if you're a designer that also creates or wants to create data-driven websites. I create some of my asp code in Visual Studio. Unfortunately, Visual Studio doesn't work near as well as Dreamweaver for layout and most basic tasks. I much prefer to do layout and basic data-connected web controls in Dreamweaver if I can help it. Also, I prefer to use Dreamweaver templates. Because of Dreamweaver's tight integration with Flash and Fireworks, it will probably always be my main application. Also, as a designer, I like the clean design that is used in the examples in this book. I already own a couple of books by Zak Ruvalcaba (I own the previous version of this book). I believe that Zak is much better at explaining asp.net programming than any of the other authors that specialize teaching programming to designers.

I just wanted to "put into perspective" the one-star ratings:

A lot of people seem to find this a bad book because there are so many "errors". They are right about the errors. Yes, a lot of figures are wrong, and yes, the mentioned support site doesn't exist. But, no, this does not degrade the book. The misplaced figures are usually only misplaced by one, so that's easily bypassed, anyway, the text is so clear you don't really need the figures. And indeed, the mentioned support site is incorrect, but you can download all files at www.sampspublishing.com (it took me a full 5 minutes to figure this out, so what's the fuss?)

In all, it seems that none of the low-star reviews could overcome the occasionaly not so carefully applied cosmetics of the book, and totally missed that it's a really great book, as mentioned by the high-star reviews.

This is one of the major web page authoring tools out there in the marketplace. Broadly, the book divides into two parts. One is the purview of earlier authoring packages, including previous versions of Dreamweaver. Namely, the building of HTML pages, of course. Plus the use of CSS to easily enforce a common style across a set of pages. The power of Dreamweaver can be seen in how it manages to hide almost all of the HTML tags from you. No grungy scrabbling around with these. Instead, it gives an extensive GUI that lets you easily construct complex pages.

But the second part of the book is also interesting. It focuses on the setting up and running of a web server. And hooking it to various databases like MySQL. If you have a Microsoft machine, the book takes you on an extensive tour of combining ASPs and Dreamweaver to fashion dynamic pages. Including the enabling of simple e-commerce, using shopping carts. Plus there is even a section on using Web Services.

You can see how Dreamweaver has moved into the space of competing with web containers like Tomcat, JBoss and WebSphere. Though it lacks the extensive abilities of those. Of course, by the same token, they don't have much (anything?) in the way of building visually appealing pages.

This book turned out to be a big disappointment. For one, I found too many errors. There are numerous misspellings and incorrect information. For instance, part of the book defines a JPEG as a "glossy compression format". If I hadn't read numerous other books about JPEG files, I might not have noticed this. The author should have defined a JPEG as a "lossy" format.. not "glossy". I can handle a few errors and misspellings. However, the biggest issue I have with this book is the "companion" website. As many readers of training or technical books know, companion websites are important when learning. This book requests that the reader download samples files from it's companion website. Unfortunately, the website is defunct. This is a fairly new book and should be more current than it is. This book had potential, but just didn't meet my basic accuracy requirements. This book turned out to be more frustration than it's worth.

Being an amateur web developer, I was hoping to learn a new skill. This however was not the book to teach me Dreamweaver.

As other reviewers have mentioned, this book was filled with errors. I can understand some spelling errors or a couple of mistakes, but this was chaulked full of them. The website referenced many times was also not available. It would have been nice to have been able to download some of the samples that were mentioned.

I would not recommend this book.

This book take the reader to the highest place in the Dreamweaver knowledge. This book is the perfect choice for both web designers and developers. Teach with a singular technique , how to create Static and Dynamic pages with Dreamweaver , exploring the CSS options, layout with tables and layers, utilization of images and media content as Flash, utilization of Behaviors, integration with other programs, connection with databases and interaction with those using the SQL, A good view about ASP, ASP.NET, PHP and ColdFusion, the creation of Recordsets, Dynamic Contents, Master/Detail Pages, Insertion Deletion and Update of records at a Database, e-commerce with Shopping Cart, User Authentication and Restricting the Access to some pages, Integration with XML Webservices, Accessibility Issues, and the best of all in my opinion: explores and expands the software possibilities with the creation of components with a practical way.
I recommend this book to beginners, intermediate and also to advanced Dreamweaver users and Web design/developers. Is one of the better Dreamweaver Books released at the last years.

I found the examples on samspublishing site but where do I found the extension files that are needed?

I'm not so good that I could sneak and read the code and copy it and modify it to my needs.

So where can I found the extension? Ex. The shopping cart extension

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 Unleashed is by far the best book I have seen for anyone who wants to get into the web designing business. Each section is very detailed and shows many examples of how to design effective websites. I have seen other how-to books for Dreamweaver but none of them can even compare to this publication. The authors have effectively shown step by step procedures for some of the easiest to the hardest web coding tasks you can perform with Dreamweaver.

This book shows many ways that you can use to make your site 100% better by incorporating Macromedia Fireworks and Flash. There are also several tutorials for working with other web languages such as php, asp, javaScript and cold fusion as well as assistance with setting up an Apache WebServer. Overall I would recommend this book to everyone from "newbies" to the most advanced webmasters as an invaluable source of information for using Macromedia Dreamweaver.
-us3rX-

Reasons not to buy this book: (1) has an invalid website (which is referred to MANY times in this book). How are you to train with this book when supplemental materials aren't even available? I agree with other readers -- this is VERY annoying. (2) Like other readers, I found numerous mistakes. It's obvious this book was rushed to press. I emailed the authors/publishers in early Jan 2005, and I still haven't heard anything about their site or list of errata. VERY DISSAPOINTING! Maybe I can find someone to buy this book from me, but I doubt it.