Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual

by David Sawyer McFarland

As the Web's popularity continues to soar, so does that of Macromedia Dreamweaver, one of the most elegant and powerful web-page creation programs you can buy. Dreamweaver deploys a rich,... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0596000979
• ISBN13: 9780596000974
• Release Date: July 2001
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media
• Length: 480 Pages
• Weight: 1.63 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Great for the novice and the pro

Other reviewers seem to think this book is fabulous, too, but only for beginners. Yet within the first two chapters, I found two tips that will save me far more than the purchase price. As a designer of online training courses, I became a fan of Dreamweaver years ago, when Macromedia added Coursebuilder, which makes it easy to add tests to your website. So I was among the first to upgrade to version 4.0. While there is much to love in the upgrade, one frustration was the handy little button on the Object panel that inserted Break tags -- HTML coding that skips you to the next line without leaving a blank line in between. I remember wasting an hour under deadline looking for it, finally settling for the keyboard shortcut. But there in McFarland's book, not only do I find out where it is hidden, but I learn about other goodies I had never spotted before. Yes, indeed, I want more about SSI -- but that's why I hope McFarland write's a follow-up. And, yes, there are things like the DW FTP function that are awful -- but that's Macromedia's fault, not the author's. If all the other books in the Missing Manual series are as good as this, I will need to add a new bookshelf.

THE BEST EVER

I have never been tempted to take the time to write one of these online reviews until I read this book. It's been so helpful to me in my work and has saved me so many hours of unnecessary labor that I thought I ought to tell people about it. I've got lots of these kinds of books - from the dummy books to the huge bibles - but Dreamweaver:The Missing Manual is leagues better than any of them! By the first few pages, I knew that this book would be fabulous, and it is. I like it because it is written for an intelligent reader, yet it uses non-techy language. Plus, there are lots of humorous references, which makes reading it fun. Importantly, it doesn't assume technical knowledge on the part of the reader. It explains the whys along with the hows. This is of utmost value to me - I find the "whys" missing in many books. Often, a tutorial will say, "Do this. Then do this. Then do this." Well, any monkey can follow 1,2,3 instructions, but if you don't know WHY you're doing something, you won't be able to apply it to something else later on. I am constantly frustrated by that. I wanted more than a beginner's book, but I wanted the complex stuff explained in simple language. This book does that.I started to bookmark the pages where I learned something valuable and realized I was marking the whole damned book - that's the type of book this is.

Excellent Guide

DreamWeaver 4: The Missing Manual is a book that is easy to follow and gives many great examples of how to perform various tasks using DreamWeaver (DW). As a novice DW user (but not at web design), I found the tutorials to be very helpful in learning more about this complex product. Among the topics covered? Basics like text fomatting, adding links, and images. The book's second part goes into more advanced subjects like Tables, Frames, and Cascading Style Sheets. It also explains forms and inserting JavaScript into your code, as well as incorporating other types of media (like Flash & ShockWave) into your file. There were certain items I'd seen in web site code done in DW that I'd never understood and thanks to this book, I certainly do now.If you're a novice (like me) or even an intermediate DW user, this book is well worth having not only to learn more but to keep as a handy reference.

Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual

The book reads like a story book! It is very well written and quite comphrensive. The book is far far better than the other high priced glossy books on Dreamweaver. The book has a companion web site for tutorial files and much more.My only concern is that if the authors of the 'missing manual' series keep writing such good quality books, the software companies may altogether stop publishing user manuals!

so far so good

This is book is very easy to follow. Although I am only half way through the book, it really goes into a lot of detail, is very easy to follow and the tutorials are strong. I suggest this book to both beginners and intermediates.