Customer Reviews

Special Edition Using Microsoft Expression Web

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(10)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you have been using Front Page and think you are going to jump right into Microsoft Expression, you are in for a big surprise. You are basically "starting over" to learn a new Website building program. I am very familiar with Front Page, but that was of little help in finding my way around Expression.

Using Microsoft Expression Web is an excellent and well-written book. It is of tremendous help for me in learning and utilizing Expression. It has step-by-step examples, helpful illustrations, troubleshooting help for each chapter, and tips thrown in as you go along.

I have four books plus the manual to help me stay afloat with Dreamweaver MX. I have one book, Jim Cheshire's Using Microsoft Expression Web, to help me stay afloat with Expression. If you purchase Expression, get this book along with it.

Kesali

I found the book difficult to follow. For example, Expression Web offers four options for publishing. All of them were described in some detail, but I still can't tell which one to use for a simple website. The book does a good job of telling you everything you would find out eventually if you clicked the options yourself at random. Unfortunately, I needed something with a more focused approach, not something that keeps telling me there three other ways to do whatever I want to do.
The book does capture a certain enthusiasm for standards and cascading style sheets, but would profit from practicing what it preaches. Focusing on a central idea in each chapter and subordinating the rest would help readers like me. I'll order the Visual Quick Start and keep this for reference.

I found myself struggling to get started using Microsoft Expression Web.

I emailed feedback to Que Publishing. I was pleased to receive a reply from the author. Jim Cheshire made me aware that both he and Que publishing are committed to assisting any reader of the book.

Being new to working with web sites, I asked if I needed some prerequisite to achieve a basic level of knowledge to build on. I found out that the target audience would be those with some exposure (Jim Cheshire said "intermediate users"). I was told I might experience rapid progress once I learned the basics.

I discovered one of the appendices has references to additional resources that I will explore.

There is also a CD-ROM with sample files for the book, as well as a menu builder and a logo creator.

I intend to grow into this book, but I will also look for something that will help me get started by specifically addressing issues for beginners to web site design.

Perhaps this sharing of my experience will be helpful to others who are also just starting to learn about web sites.

The popular web design tool from Microsoft named FrontPage was first developed by a software company named Vermeer. Microsoft bought the company, and down through the years has updated, revised, and greatly expanded FrontPage to make it an ever more powerful tool. Having said that, FrontPage remained a tool of the casual web developer, not the professional. It simply had too many structural problems to be useful at a professional level.

Now Microsoft has done a basic structural re-write of FrontPage, fixing problems, making the resulting web pages standards compliant, supporting the new standards, and incorporating Microsoft's new expanded operating system environment ASP.NET.2.0. The result is an entirely new package that builds on the FrontPage concepts and takes them to a new level.

Jim Cheshire maintains the JimcoSoftware website which is the best known source of add-ins for FrontPage. He has worked in the FrontPage team at Microsoft, and now works in the ASP.NET team. He has been a FrontPage fan for many years and has written this book from the view of one who completely understands his subject but still knows how to inform the beginner of what's going on. This is as good, as complete, a book on 'Expression Web' as you will ever find.

I've used FrontPage since its first release and never came close to learning all it could do. The thought of moving into Expression Web was scary, and after installing it and looking at a blank site, I thought I'd have a heart attack. Last night I bought this book, and the veil lifted. I've since imported a site, followed the book, and am now on Chapter 8 (reading front to back). This time I am not going to "just get by" because the book is so clear that I WANT to learn more. My only regret is that Jim Cheshire didn't write a book on the rest of the Expression Suite of tools, because then I would have a chance at ramping far more quickly.

This book is written well enough to read as a text, but is also an excellent reference material. My copy is full of Post-It Notes and dog-eared pages.

Ed Detlie

When was the last time you emailed the author of a book and he/she replied in five minutes? Mega-kudos to Jim Cheshire--not only for a well-written, thorough examination of Microsoft Expression, but also for caring enough about the end-user to [quickly] reply to a request for clarification on an exercise in the book.

That alone is worth twice what I paid.

If you have Microsoft Expression, you need this book.

This book is an excellent guide for exploring the features of Expression Web. The book also with some bonus software. The only drawback to this book is that about half of the book is dedicated to ASP.NET. If one will not be using ASP.NET, another smaller book may be more fiscal to use for an introduction to Expression Web. The book is not a complete guide for CSS, and buyer must be aware that this books is a user's manual for Expression Web, not web authoring in general.

This book is more of a reference book than a book for someone new to Expression Web. At the moment I am familiar with HTML and have used FrontPage but unfortunately this book was of little help to me. If you are looking for guidance as to create WebPages using Expression Web this is not your book. At the moment I can't attest its qualities as a reference book.

I bought this reference finding gaps in my usual reference guides, the Peachpit's Visual QuickStart Guides. While `plain jane' books these have tight indices, annotated and precise graphics. Well I was delighted to say those gaps were more than filled by Jim Cheshire's "Special Edition". This book holds one's hand and is quite methodical and provides an easy entry to those wanting to migrate from FrontPage.

It is marked as being "Intermediate to Advanced" level and therefore it can be excused from not defining some basic terms notably in the front sections. Then again, it is very loose with words, with anecdotes fluff and stuff (the overused "great and salutes to Microsoft") that could instead have been used for a brief introduction to the terms for those that don't quite make the rank of "Intermediate" level user and dont know eg. what a "tag" is.

As comprehensive as it is, the index is very incomplete and begs concatenation, if not just tidying up. It is poor!

Screen captures often require some annotation even if just an arrow or some words to point and qualify or else they just fill space without advancing one's understanding.

So I find myself still using my `plain jane' Quickstart reference with Que's "Special Edition" for gap filling. That said, to be fair, sometimes the topic is covered in this "Special Edition" but is drowned or lost without a decent index, (for example the former has a clear index reference on detaching a style sheet, it it is most difficult to find a reference to it in Que's).

Give it a make over, cut some of the fluff, use the graphics better with annotation and Cheshire would have a five star book.