Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: wow.
Comment: i enjoyed this book. it opened my eyes to coldfusion, asp, and php web site design.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Disappointing At Best
Comment: The book was good up until the 10th Chapter in my opinion. I went through the excercises developing on a remote server running PHP/ MySQL. Up until the 10th chapter the author made several minor mistakes in the hand code to insert for both PHP and also in how to modify the existing SQL file to upload it to a remote database server via PHP My Admin. I must admit that researching and solving these mistakes on my own was a valuable learning experience. The real problem occurred starting with chapter 11. After uploading and testing my pages after each step as coached to by the author I began getting MySQL syntax error messages prompting me to consult the manual for my version of MySQL. I verified that my hosting company was running the same version of MySQL that the author demonstrated to those developing locally to install so I loaded the completed pages for the lesson from the CD and they would not open at all. At least the pages I was developing would load and had some functionality so that tells me that there was not even continuity between the completed pages on the CD and the text in the book. I think that is pretty inexcusable that nobody bothered to make sure that the completed projects worked in all development environments both locally and remote. I would have to say that the book is a complete waste of time for the PHP/ MySQL developer. To be fair I plan to upgrade my hosting account to include Cold Fusion so I can go through the book again following the Cold Fusion steps. Maybe they will work fine, one can only hope. Right now I can't recommend the book as it was extremely frustrating to put in all the time I did in the earlier chapters only to run into an insurmountable roadblock. One other thing of note is that the author invited readers to visit his website for updates and errata but when you go there you find that it has not been updated since 2004 and doesn't even mention Dreamweaver 8. It also says that the author's company is out of business so I must assume that Adobe/ Macromedia just copied the MX 2004 book (errors that it had and all) and just put a new jacket on it and changed the label on the CD and put it to market. I would have expected more from a $45.00 book that supports a $500.00 program. There is a book called "Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8" written by David Powers that has received high reviews that I am going to try next.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good Resource
Comment: One thing I am still not sure of with the whole Adobe - Macromedia merger is the status of Macromedia Press. Thier books are essential to any professional. When my Studio 8 came in the mail, the first thing I noticed was that there was no book inside. This book becomes paramount to now helping me through the changes with 8 with respect to Dreamweaver and it should for you too - especially if you like to thumb paper rather than scroll PDF's.
Like earlier versions of this book, it conctrates your learning by going through the steps of a project. The accompaning cd has all the tutorial files as well as a trail version of DW8 - so no excuses.
Depending on how long you have used DW, you might not find much in the first few chapters, but the lessons get intense quickly with lesson 3 having you set up a local server (note you best have Windows XP Pro to do this) and delving into dynamic web sites.
The book does a good job at explaining the CSS features of Dreamweaver, however if you do not know CSS, best you get a book on that first before getting into this one. This book is for those ready to hit the ground running... no standing still on this one.
Great trainging manual for introductory classes and intermediate and below users, though more advanced users could use it from the staff library to brush up skills or find an answer to the odd probelem associated with new releases.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Finally, a "complete" tutorial
Comment: I found this book to be an excellent tutorial for using Dreamweaver as a development environment. I used PHP, Apache and MySQL. While I hit a few snags ("BIT" datatype generated an error when accessed in Dreamweaver and I had to search the Web for a Dreamweaver problem) I did the whole process and got a real feeling for the entire dynamic/databased Web application environment. If you haven't built many Web pages before, I recommend working through your errors without just loading the completed pages from the CD. The results of the errors are instructive as well.
I recommend also getting a reference book for Dreamweaver as this book doesn't cover every nuance of Dreamweaver (e.g. the History tab and undos).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Great beginners book, tries a little too much on advanced topics
Comment: This book was an amazingly enlightening experience. I know a few web developers, and have heard them rant and rave about dynamic web development. After reading this book I understand exactly what they are talking about. This book did an amazing job on introducing the dreamweaver interface, although the main focus was explaining how different technologies (ASP, Coldfusion, PHP, and even SQL) can be used for web development in many different applications. I found the walkthroughs very informative, giving a professional perspective on the different technologies. Each lesson had a good purpose in contributing to the final goal, creating a dynamic tour site that employees could update.
I did encounter some issues with this book, however. I found that the author tried very heavily to force feed the coding; assuming those who were reading had no experience with the languages. It became slightly annoying when I reached the point where I could no longer keep up with the pages of new code that I had to program to make the sites work. By the end of the book I was so frustrated I just copied the code down just to get through the last few pages. I would DEFINATELY recommend going through this book, deciding which server technology you would like to work with, and pursue that through other books. Regardless of what server technology you decide, a good SQL book is a must. After I finish some other books I believe I will appreciate the knowledge this book gave me (perhaps to a 5 star level), but for now it gets 4 stars.
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