Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating: 
Summary: Thorough and concise
Comment: This is the fourth book I've owned in the Quickstart series (all relating to Adobe design products or their predecessors) and find it to be an excellent series. Each book has been thorough and well-organized without being wordy. As for the negative reviews about this book: it's worth keeping in mind that no publisher is going to stake its reputation (and bottom line) on an incompetent author. Rather, books (and series) are written with a specific agenda. This book is meant to serve as a concise guide and reference manual and is not a tutorial: if you're looking for step-by-step exercises, look elsewhere.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Worst Self-Study Guide I've Ever Used
Comment: I've taught myself quite a lot of what I do from self-study books, and have never experienced such a frustrating mess as this book. I dutifully went through 3/4 of the book and know absolutlely nothing more about using CSS with Dreamweaver than I did before.
It skips over basic concepts, rehashes the obvious over and over, and makes huge leaps of faith from chapter to chapter. When you go from Chapter 5 to Chapter 6, you'll wonder what happened to the three chapters that should have been between them.
Additionally, the book boasts of a companion website and the ability to email questions to the authors. Well, their website is completely devoid of content, and they don't respond to email questions.
Don't buy this book. Buy ANYTHING else.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Agree with "utterly useless..."
Comment: I have to agree with the previous "utterly useless" review. This book is terrible. I am a complete novice at website design and Dreamweaver. This book does not teach you anything--it does not give you detailed instruction to the novice nor is it a reference book.
If you are a novice like me you will not learn anything from this book. I will be returning to the book store to look for another book. This book was a total waste of time.
This book is incredibly unorganized. For example, in the chapter on CSS this is what is says:
Chapter 5
Understanding CSS
Cascading Style Sheets are all about style, looks, and presentation. CSS properties and rules give you an amazing array of control over foregrounds, backgrounds, colors, fonts, positions, alignments, margins, borders, lists, and other aspects of presentations.
Appendix C contains a list of CSS properties. That list is amazing in its scope, but it can be a little overwhelming as well.
Appendix C!!!! This is the explanation of CSS. This book is pathetic. It gives no conceptual explanation of CSS or practical knowledge of how Dreamweaver utilizes it.
Save your money and buy something else.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Utterly Useless
Comment: This book is a completely useless guide to Dreamweaver. Nothing inside it will help you use Dreamweaver or get you any closer to being able to build a website using this powerful software. Under no circumstances should you ever buy this book.
The problem with the book is that, on one hand, it is not a step-by-step guide to building a webpage using Dreamweaver. You do not learn to build a website, and the examples provided in the book are seemingly random. On the other hand, it is not a useful reference text, either -- each section builds upon what you have allegedly learned from building a non-existent, non-specific webpage using the previous chapter.
For example, the "Positioning Page Content" chapter opens with a sentence that begins with, "Now that you've created boxes on your page...", assuming that the previous chapter clearly tells you how to create CSS boxes. It doesn't. You're left wondering why you bought the book at all, if it simply assumes you've learned the things you bought the book to learn.
The book is full of oversights like this. It's sloppily-written, overpriced, and if anything will confuse and derail any attempt you're making to actually learn how to use Dreamweaver. Do not buy it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Get your foot in the door
Comment: I was pretty familiar with website creation software before Dreamweaver, so just needed something to get me started. The interface is quite a bit different than Frontpage and other web programs, so this book is definitely useful for learning your way around. It's also a good introduction to the more powerful features that dreamweaver offers.
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