Customer Rating:  
Summary: Poor Project Focus
Comment: The 'quickproject' series is a great concept, but in this instance the author doesn't focus on the project at hand. Instead, he interrupts the workflow with other topics that don't contribute toward the successful completion of the project. It almost seems as if the author and/or editor sporadically lost faith in the simple genius of devoting every page in the book to a SINGLE project, start to finish, and omitting tangents, references, and other distractors. Or maybe they were going for page count? In any event, I'd love to buy a 'quickproject' book that focuses exclusively on how to create a web page in Dreamweaver 8. Maybe that's an idea for the second edition?
Customer Rating:
Summary: Flawed but Useable
Comment: Although the book gives you the impression that you'll be building the website shown in the book from start to finish, much like you'd assemble a piece of IKEA furniture, the book itself is never quite committed to this goal. Sometimes it seems like you are indeed building the project in the book, at other times the lessons appear isolated from each other, and are shown only for you to apply them to your own project. If the site in the book were a table from IKEA, you would end up with two legs attached to the top, plus a number of parts left over, and be one frustrated owner.
The book should be re-edited to live up to its QuickProject name, strictly focusing on the concept of walking the reader through a project from start to finish, and put together in a smoother fashion so that you are indeed building the site as shown, and will end up, at the end, with the site as shown.
That said, I was able to use the book to approximately build the site depicted in the book, but this was only after cursing the places where one lesson didn't flow into the next, and girding myself to forge ahead anyway. There were a number of times where I wanted to throw the book at the wall, and I consider myself to be someone who is good at putting things together. Someone with less determination would have given up, and I couldn't blame them.
This is a shame, because the visuals are beautiful, and the step by step instruction, within a lesson or major concept is very good. I learned a lot about Dreamweaver quite effortlessly, once I got past the choppy nature of the book, and became willing to accept a much less than perfect website. I did feel a bit cheated however.
The obvious lack of testing of the instructions in this book is amateurish, and the people who produced this book should be ashamed of themselves, given all the other great work that went into it. This could've been a really great tutorial but for the obvious lack of focus on the QuickProject core concept, and the lack of follow through to make sure the entire web project flowed seamlessly.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Confusing and not really a tutorial
Comment: I'm a big fan of the Peachpit Visual QuickStart Guides and was rather pleased with what I learned from a Visual QuickProject Guide on Flash ("Creatig a Web Site with Flash"). I've used Dreamweaver MX quite a bit but skipped Dreamweaver MX2004 when it came out as I was happy with MX.
When Dreamweaver 8 came out and I saw how different it was I had to get the new version. Since I already knew how to use Dreamweaver I got this book hoping for a PDQ tutorial to give me the basics of Dreamweaver 8 to get me started, knowing I could use the help files to find whatever else I needed as I worked.
The first thing I did after getting the book was look at the errata site, it said that no errors have been reported so I dug in. Almost immediately I was confused and finding errors -- almost on every page! I started writing a page-by-page error file to send to the author. It turned into a bigger project than I thought it would be and was taking more time than going through the brief book.
Also, this is not a tutorial book. The author assumes that you will be working on another project on your own and somehow working with the book at the same time. Even the files that you download to use with the book are already completed so their value is diminished.
If you want to learn Dreamweaver 8 I'd skip this book and get the full "Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide", "Dreamweaver 8 -The Missing Manual" or "Dreamweaver 8: Training from the Source" instead. Save the frustration. My copy is going back today.
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