Customer Reviews

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Dynamic Applications: Advanced Training from the Source

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Jeffrey did a wonderful job on this book. He takes a complex subject and makes it understandable. He takes a static site and makes it dynamic. It includes cleaning up the code and making it XHTML compliant. The explanations of the difference of XHTML and HTML are very clear. The creative use of Find and Replace to strip out old tags and close others is very useful.

In the redesign of the static site you'll use ASP and ColdFusion, add CSS and add an invisible navigation to accessibility reasons. You'll see the pros and cons of the various server models as well as adding a web form and configuring a server for SMTP message service.

The book then moves into databases. A few basics but quickly move to displaying XHTML-formatted database content dynamically. You'll create a recordset to retrieve data to build a list of URLs dynamically. You'll also add images dynamically and generate the ALT attribute dynamically.

A search is done and a registration page. An administration section is built to manage the content using update pages.

If you are already familiar with Dreamweaver but want to learn how to use ASP and ColdFusion portions of the application, this is a great place to start. It's difficult for books that need to cover the entire application to go into this kind of detail. Plus I suspect that there are an awful lot of static sites out there that need to become dynamic (including mine). This book walks you though the process.

The one aspect that's not perfect is this book doesn't include JSP or PHP/MySQL, but more on that later...

Whoa! Finally a tech book that was written by an educator who knows how to teach and proofed by an editor that actually took the time to read it. Other than a few minor typos, I don't think I found one code error or other significant mistake in this book. Take note Sams and Sybex and other publishers that don't care about making mistakes!!

If I had the ability and knowledge to write a book on this subject, this is exactly how I would do it. Bardzell is extremely knowledgable on the subject, and he writes in a way that anyone can understand, without making it too simple. It's possible that some may conclude there is too much handholding in this book, but for novices it's great, and for others, it's easy to skip the few sentences/paragraphs that reiterate basic procedures.

Bardzell starts with some basics that can be skipped if needed, but are useful to go through nonetheless. I found the XHTML chapter and CSS refresher useful and nicely succinct. But he quickly gets past that and right into the dynamic info that we bought the book for in the first place. The code and explanations are clear and easy to follow, and if you go through the book linearly (which I strongly suggest), it follows a smooth learning pattern, with each section building on the next. The example, a travel tour site, is very much a real-world exercise. Everything you learn can be transferred to other sites you're probably working on.

But back to the JSP & PHP/MySQL ommission: This book uses Cold Fusion and ASP as the server models. Both are covered very well, but if you can't afford CF, or you're one of those that prefers open source to the Microsoft All-conquering Domination Model, then be prepared to spend a lot more time on each lesson as you convert the provided code into JSP or PHP. It's do-able, and in a brief e-mail communication with the author, he mentioned that he had also built the example site in PHP, so you know it can be done. But hopefully you already know JSP or PHP, rather than doing what I did and try to learn it on the fly.

I would definately consider this a 5-star book if you're looking for CF or ASP instruction, and I've never given a 5-star rating before to anything. But for PHP or JSP users, plan on doubling the time estimates of each lesson.

Jefferey Bardzell has done a masterful job of teaching how to use Dreamweaver, ASP and Microsoft Access to create truly interactive web sites. His presentation is very clear and the detailed examples are perfect. If you follow the book you will build a real world web site using most of the techniques you would ever need to build dynamic web applications. It covers communication between html pages and accessing databases on-line. He deliberately takes you through both hand-coding and using Dreamweaver.
The editing and accuracy in this book is superb. For the one place where I encountered a problem there was a work around on the book's web site. This book is the real thing and definitely worth the money.
To get the most out of this book, the reader should have some programming experience to fully appreciate the hand-coding examples. It is definitely not a book to start learning Dreamweaver.

I bought this book a couple of years ago and it's been quietly residing on my bookshelf. I am developing a new dynamic web site so it was time to take the book off the shelf, dust it off, and dive into it, even though I thought that some of the information in the book would be out of date (I recently upgraded to DW 8). To my surprise, nothing was out of date. All of the screenshots were the same and everything worked well. The publisher could replace the cover with one entitled DW 8 Dynamic Apps and you would not know the difference.

More important, this is a great book. It's very well-organized and clearly written. Jeffrey Bardzell helps you build a web site using asp and DW. His instruction was crystal clear and before you know it, you have developed a dynamic web site. I highly recommend this book!

As a contract web designer for one of the areas largest credit card banks, I was well versed in static web page creation. Sure the online credit card application forms are dynamic, but my job was to create a static page that was later married to dynamic content by someone else. I knew that there was more to web design than static page content. This book gives you the bridge to take you from static to dynamic which definitely increases your salability as a web designer. Jeffrey Bardzell writes with an extremely clear style that makes for the understanding of some potentially deep information to be easy on the brain. Having read tons of software books in the past, it was sometimes very frustrating to figure out what the author was trying to convey. Not so with this book. Early on in lesson 4, I ran into a techo glitch (on my side) in setting up my computer with ColdFusion. I emailed Jeffrey and he solved the issue with a quick return email. I also teach graphic arts at a local college and the one thing that I constantly strive for in teaching is clarity of information. Jeffrey has done this on a consistent basis and I appreciate not only the great exercises of the book (I believe that you only learn by doing), the clarity of each step with the how's and why's, plus the feeling that I got that I can really learn this stuff. I would highly recommend this book if your want to take your skills to the next level.

Excellent book. I have taken advantage of these reviews for years now, I love Amazon for this feature. It is time for me to finally give back to you all.

I had a little html and asp, but I wanted to learn the best practices and techniques of ASP quickly. I needed it yesterday like always. This book allowed me to utilize Dreamweaver to its fullest and also create my own asp code to access my SQL Server 2000 data. I even implemented some of their page ideas into my site to save some time. The order that they teach the different skills is perfect, they build on each other and make it very simple and fun to do (that isnt easy with asp). I now use asp in all my pages on my site. I wish they had one of these for ASP.NET for my next step. The only complaint would be that it is a short book, but well worth it. This is a great beginner and intermediate book.

I'm one of those people who wishes I could go back in time and relive parts of my life with the knowledge I have today. That said, this is the book I would take with me back to the time when I started designing websites. I don't believe there is a single task I've wanted to undertake that it doesn't address... and address well.

If you learn by doing, this book is for you. Just don't expect to resell it as a used book on this site... I suspect you'll have it by your side as a reference manual for some time to come.

My first introduction to this series of books was when I took a Macromedia Director class for a "certified instructor". At first, I was disappointed in the fact that I would actually pay someone to go step by step through a book. In the end, I wasn't disappointed at all.

Typical to Macromedia Press, this book is meant as a walk-thru tutorial covering many of the features you need to get up and running. User Authentication, forms, Post, Cookies, etc. are all well explained and can be applied immediately to your own web applications - and all the code works!! No troubleshooting is necessary.

Although the book is designed to be a complete "course", it is a great reference and has the ability to use all the content or just 1 or 2 chapters. This book is a MUST if you are new to dynamic websites!!

Great book. I've struggled through explanations of Dreamweaver asp pages and database interactions in a number of books and was never satisfied with what I was learning. I always felt they were making it overly complex. Now, after working through this book, I feel justified. They were making it overly complex ... and Bardzell makes it easy.

This book was shipped on time and i had no problems. I used the book and it works great. It helped me a lot with my designing issues.