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40 of 40 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Effective educationally, editorially efiicient, and easy., August 24, 2003
I come to Dreamweaver as a reasonably good HTML programmer, and an advanced beginner in PHP and MySQL. I was looking for a Dreamweaver book that would get me up to speed quickly on the ins and outs of the program, without a lot of unnecessary text and gobble-de-gook thickening the volume but not imparting information. On that basis, Dreamweaver HOT succeed - it is an entirely comprehensive book for the beginning Dreamweaver-er, especially if you have no HTML experience and come to the application as a Designer. If you are a bit more advanced, you'll find this book quite easy to skim through, as its easy design makes jumping redundant parts possible, but ultimately you'll find it a little bit lightweight.Overall, the book is well laid out with sections tackling each of the major areas you'd be interested in learning: tables, CSS, the odious frames, rollovers, etc. I knocked this off In a long afternoon - despite being 645 pages - as it is very image heavy, which seems to make sense for the material. The layout is very nice and "webby", if that adjective makes sense. The authors are obviously knowledgeable and come across as sympathetic without being patronizing (unlike the Dummies books which I used to adore but now despise.) The authors, from their backpage promo photos, appear to be 20-somethings, and the book is written at that level. A lot of "sweet", "nice!", and "cool" interjections in here, and some hipster commiseration with the fact that you're inside reading a *computer programming* guide rather than, say, listening to Blonde Redhead down at the alternative coffee shop. These never come across as cloying or goofy, though, and in my opinion make the somewhat dry subject matter a little easier to slog through. There is a lot of hand-holding in this book for the designer. The authors are very careful to flag any missteps or strange things you might come across. They explain each feature from two or three different angles, without being repetitive. And they are very thorough in making sure that nobody could be left behind due to poor Macromedia design, conflicting web standards or misunderstood terminology, e.g., "As you work through Dreamweaver MX, you will notice references to a local root folder, a root folder, and root. All these terms are interchangeable. Each refers to a folder on your hard drive that contains all of the HTML, images, etc. for your Web site. This can be any folder on your computer. It can be empty, or it can have an entirely completed Web site. Don't be confused by this slight difference in terminology." None left behind. The authors also do a reasonably good job of guessing what a designer might be looking to accomplish, laying out the steps to get there, and placing flashing warning lights near common mistakes: "As you have just seen, the purpose of this exercise was to get you comfortable inserting different Form objects and modifying some of their properties. Remember, to make a form perform its functions, you would need to attach a CGI or other scripting program to it." I skipped the hands-on demos on the attached CD as they seemed targeted at folks who have confidence problems in dealing with menus, forms, and pop-up interfaces. So I can't tell you a lot about how well those work. This book is most appropriate for designers, people with limited or no HTML knowledge, and folks looking to just make a site without having to become an expert in computer science. With that as the target market, I think this book succeeds very well, and is well worth it or you. I feel that somebody with coding experience and a good understanding of HTML could probably find a better place to spend... for a Dreamweaver guide. Big chunks of the application - those that deal with scripting, database interfaces, etc., are "out of the scope" of this book, which is editorially consistent with their target audience, but probably not what you are looking for. In your case, perhaps the O'Reilly book would be better. I'm reading that this upcoming week and should have a review up then. So although I'm happy with the level of knowledge I acquired, I give this book a 5 out of 5 for newbies and a 3 out of 5 for experienced web people. Enjoy.
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