MX

This book is definitely geared towards beginners, but at the same time I found a lot of the explanations a little lacking. The book will walk you through steps but not explain "why" you're doing those steps. It seems to me the authors spent to much money on printing in color and not enough on writing a well thoughtout book.

With the many books out there on the subject, I was really impressed with how clear and easy to use this book is. You can work through the tasks in any order you like, even with no previous experience. Everything is laid out in an easy follow format, and the color pictures help to see everything clearly. I would recommend this as the perfect beginners book as it covers everything you need to create a website with great graphics as well as giving handy tips that I had not seen anywhere else. Money well spent.

I really like this book a lot. I have other books on Dreamweaver and Flash but this is my favorite for both.
First it selects the essential tasks you have to do. For a small book it's incredible how often the procedure you need is right there.
Second, it picks a smart easy way to do each of the things. Other books have examples that are overly complex for no good reason.
Third, each procedure is profusely illustrated so it's hard to miss the point. One screen shot for every step. It even has circles around the button on the screen shots and a picture of a mouse with the word "click". In the middle of the night you really appreciate this kind of idiot-proof design format.
Finally, it's a really pretty book. After a wading through books with 1,000 pages of text, something this colorful is easy on the eyes.

I am a graphic designer learning web design software. I gave this book several tries, but quit the Complete Course tutorial after the third lesson. I found I was not learning much I could use outside the tutorial as the approach was directive without explaining the underlying logic. Without that basic understanding, I did not have enough information to trouble-shoot beginner errors. Several times I just quit the program when I couldn't figure out how to undo something. Most of my questions were answered either accidentally by random clicking or through a web-search. (Examples from early chapters: the books instructs you to type in the hex color numbers for various attributes, but does not tell you that if you eliminate the # in front of the numbers that the color will show in Explorer but not in Netscape. Or, it does not define what an S or V value is, but rather tells you about a problem they can cause if an object is left or right justified.) I switched to Dreamweaver MX Hands-On-Trainin. The tutorial is much more basic but provides a much fuller base of information.

I got this book reading others reviews and decided it would be a great start for me. The book is way to inconsistent and could have you lost a little at times. I am not too critical on reviews and actually pretty nice about them, but this book I did not even finish after I got through about half of it. I consider myself very knowledgable with PC's in general and this book left me wishing I would have spent my money else where.

If you are like me and want to have an awesome understanding of DW, then this book does not go that in depth. The author just walks you through it with very little teaching along the way. It shows you how to build a website with all her pre-made pictures, but I felt as if I was just plugging in things the whole time, not really developing a great site. My biggest gripe was the lack of instruction, the authors way of teaching was basically do this and do that, but not telling my why I am doing this and doing that.

... The 'Dreamweaver MX Hands-On-Training' as well seems to have a great rep for great books. I regret not getting that book instead of this one. Save your money and get another book if you really want to learn the ins and outs of developing great sites with Dreamweaver.

What a hoot! I came to review this book and the contrasts seem to be love it or hate it. Well I loved it and created my very first web site! I had to do some stuff over but most of it was because I had my cursor in the wrong place or I didn't read an instruction carefully enough. Yes, I found some errors--jeesh people do we expect authors to be perfect. I wish but unfortunately I've discovered they are human LOL

Oh, and yes, I did finish the entire book and I did so pretty quickly. I like the fact that there isn't a lot of underlying explanations. If I want underlying I'll buy a Bible or other such book. I also like the casual writing style--but that's me. I felt like the author was really trying to help me personally build a website--and she did just that.

This was worth every dime I spent and I'm now going to purchase her Web Design Complete Course book. I love this teaching style, pictures and numbers.

As others have already mentioned, this book has many strange errors that occur mostly on the end-of-chapter quizzes.

I've read this book cover to cover and have taken the certification test and passed with an 85%, and it did help, but it was also very misleading. This book stresses that you should be able to visualize and know multiple ways to complete each task in dreamweaver's interface-There were no questions like this on the test. All questions regarding dreamweavers functions asked "how?" and "what?" they do, or when you would use them, NOT where they are located.

This book doesn't completely prepare you for this test. I would estimate that about 50% percent of it required well rounded knowledge of web development such as particular CSS properties, SSIs, HTML tags, POST and GET methods, entity syntax-this stuff is hardly mentioned in the book. If I had relied only on this book and had no other knowledge of web development, I would have failed. A friend of mine who also read the book cover to cover failed the test because of a lack of knowledge in the fundamentals.

If you use only this book to prepare for the exam, you will only have half the knowledge you need to pass. Since this is supposed to be a prep for the exam, I think this is inexcusable.

Good luck!

I had been warned that the Dreamweaver MX exam was tough, and this guide, weighing in at more than 600 pages, did nothing to alleviate my anxiety. However, I attacked it systematically, chapter by chapter, and as a result passed the test with a very good score.

Like many Dreamweaver users I make heavy use of a few well-known features. This book revealed a huge number of tricks, tips and obscure features I never knew about and definitely plan to use. The sample questions were fair, although they were more ambiguous and inteface-oriented than the actual test questions (thank goodness). If you take the exam, make sure you know the *actual* code and standards as well as the Dreamweaver way of doing things.

A few criticisms: the book could have used one more copy-editing pass, as there were errors in the test answers and even a few in the "Exam Watch" tips that are supposed to give you a heads up on nasty exam tricks. The CD was disappointing, since it contained only one exam (the downloadable second exam appears to be on DW/Flash integration) with questions that are drawn directly from the book. It is mainly a promo for LearnKey online training.

There are many excellent Dreamweaver books available, but this one has the advantage of hewing closely to the exam syllabus, and the results (in my case) speak for themselves.

I had taken many tips from this site regarding this book but no book in the market covers all the modules for the exam.So I bought this book and studied it from cover to cover.Yes,the exam was much more challenging and some questions had to be read thrice to understand the language.But Thank God!!! I managed to get the pass the exam but not with a good score i had expected.The exam covers indepth knowledge of HTML,CSS,Javascript and dreamweaver's way of integrating Behaviors.So all those designers,please brush your code and fundamentals and some General knowldege like the IP address of your local web server and about FTP.Lastly,this book covers the entire contents needed for the exam but the mistakes should have been avoided and the CD should have been more useful.But untill anyone releases a book for the certification this study guide by Marc Campbell would serve the purpose.

This should have been an excellent book. I bought it after carefully considering many other books with similar focus (including reading the Amazon reader reviews). I've been using DW since version 2 and certainly didn't want a basic primer. This book promised to zero in on exactly what I wanted: using DWMX to create dynamic sites with ASP.

All 5 authors seem to be knowledgeable and competent writers; a single author wrote each chapter. But IMO this book sorely needed editing for overall consistency and comprehensiveness. The whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

I suppose I was expecting something structured along the lines of Wrox's "Beginning ASP Databases": an ongoing, easy-to-implement tutorial that illustrates all of the theory in a consistent manner.

But the tutorials in this book were fragmented and difficult to follow, each one using different conventions, and often omitting information (which was sometimes found in later chapters but would have been useful earlier).

I'd love to see a second edition of this book that takes all of this information but presents it in a more cohesive manner. As it is, in order to set up PWS and get any of the examples to work, I had to rely heavily on other books and online tutorials (notably the Webthang tutorials for DWMX). It's been an exercise in frustration.

Dynamic Dreamweaver MX is an excellent book for Advancing Web Designers. I have lost count of the times I have spent [money] on a book hoping and praying that it contains at least 5 or so pages of answers to my questions within the 500 Pages it contains. I found EVERY PAGE in this book to be comprehensive and straight to the point. It is by far the best book I have yet purchased in the field of Web Design. I am at the point where I know all the basics and I need to push towards designing dynamic sites. This book gave me an absolute Solid Base to venture forth. I purchased this book a few days ago and I am already building Database driven sites with the knowledge I have gained from it. If you are at the same point I am I highly recommend you pick up this book. For the Price it is an absolute Bargain. I can see this book paying for itself 100 fold in the long run. As a matter of fact I recommend you check out all of Glasshaus's titles. Thier books are incredible. Thank You Glasshaus!!

Hats off to Glasshaus and kudos to the authors! Andrew, Elbaga, Foley, Regan, and Turnbull have not forgotten what it was like to be a beginner! Dynamic Dreamweaver MX is not just for beginners though. The book takes you through the stages of developing a dynamic website from Introducing Dreamweaver MX to Advanced Techniques. The reader is given a solid foundation on which to build. Concepts are fully explained and reinforced with hands-on tasks. I found it amazing that so much valuable information could be found in just 358 pages! This book has helped me understand not only the "how to" but, more importantly, the "why". The only question I have now is "why did it take so long for a book like this to be published"?

Added note. Do not confuse .asp with asp.net. they are two separate server technologies. this book covers conventional asp, not the newer .net.

I have read the other reviews as I often do and I must say that it seems they're a bit jaded or something. Yes these tips are geared toward the novice, but I found many that were quite interesting even for someone like me who has quite a bit of experience in Flash. I actually teach Flash and many of the questions I get from my students are addressed in this book. Make no mistake, the book is for new Flash people, but I for one like the style of writing (at least makes reading somewhat interesting) and the tips work well for me. There's one tip about adding an extension to variables in actionscript that forces Flash to recognize the variable as a certain type. I must say, I had no idea about this one and couldn't find it in the online help files anywhere. Anyhow, I certainly don't agree with the one stars at all, but then again I would say the book is geared more toward the novice for me, so I can't agree with the 5 stars. So I'll go with 4. Take it for what you will.

I've worked with Flash for years now and I'll say this. The tips in this book are certainly intended for novice to intermediate users, which I am not. Honestly, it doesn't seem like the book makes any efforts to focus on advanced users, thus I gave it 4 stars for that and the writing style which I enjoyed. The author is self-deprecating in a charming fashion. However, I can't escape the fact that the book was presented by the publisher as a book of tips for advanced users and hence my disappointment. Buy this book if you'd rate yourself from 1 to 6 of 10 on Flash knowledge, but if you're an expert there's no need.

Flash MX 2004 Killer Tips describes itself as being a book that contains all the cool tips you would normally find in the margins of other, more in depth Flash books. The tips are mostly user-interface-related, often pointing out less known but useful features that will save you time and make common tasks easier.

The book is smaller than most Flash books - it's only 191 pages long, but the space is used well. On each page there are an average of four tips-take away about 20 or 30 pages for table of contents and index stuff and you that leaves room for quite a few tips-you do the math. It's all color and the paper quality, layout and design are commendable. The author takes a very casual approach to his writing, making the book very readable and even entertaining.

If you've been using Flash for a short amount of time, or if you're new to the software, this book will be useful to you. It's a quick crash course that will have you working efficiently from the beginning rather than learning everything by trial and error.

If you've been using versions of Flash previous to MX 2004 and already consider your self to be an intermediate or advanced user, don't expect to find too much new here. Most of what you'll find will be little things here and there that will improve your process, but a lot of the material covered in this book will already be familiar.

There are a few, but not many tips specifically related to Flash MX 2004-most of what is covered are features that were already available in Flash MX. None of the features in Flash MX 2004 Professional such as Screens or Forms are mentioned. There is a small section on ActionScript, but most of what is mentioned are fairly small (but useful) tips or tweaks to the interface to make coding simpler.

If you're new to Flash and/or looking for a quick way to bring your Flash skills up to par and to improve your workflow, check out Flash MX 2004 Killer Tips.

I bought this book expecting to be able to find exercises that would help me REALLY learn the product. Boy, was I in for a big surprise. If you're a mac user, FORGET IT! This book assumes you're using a PC. Last I checked, many people who do web design are mac users. When I got to the first screen and saw that what was shown in the book was different than what I had on my computer, I gave up. It may be helpful for PC users, but if you're a mac user consider yourself ignored . . . yet again!

I am not reviewing this edition of the book. I am writing this because of a few unfairly negative reviews I see here. When I started learning Dreamweaver 4, Wendy Pecks "Dreamweaver 4 Weekend Crash Course" was the single best book I used for getting up to speed on Dreamweaver. I'm sure this book is very similar. It should be noted that I am a long time HTML handcoder who has started using Dreamweaver in the last year.

As far as those reviews who discredit it because it doesn't cover the more advanced features.... What do you expect from a crash course book. This type of book is aimed at getting beginners up to speed quickly, and it does this admirably. After that you go to on to more advanced, and in depth books.

I am always disapointed to see mac users give a bad review just because a book is not mac specific. The differences are minor. You have a couple of keys in the exact same place with different names on them, and you have to use two hands to do what we can do with one (right clicking). So what. How hard is that to deal with. I learned the most about the pen tool in Illustrator from a Mac book that was two versions older, (6 versus 8). This was substantially harder because menu choices had changed places in the newer version of Illustrator. It was still worth it because the author gave the best instruction I had come across on understanding the pen tool. When Apple allows me to build a computer from competetively priced hardware of my own chosing, I will think about giving the Mac OS a try. Until then I am happy building my own custom machines for less money with the setup that I want on them.

Wendy Peck is a very good author with a great sense of design. Check out her articles in the graphics section of webreference.com if you want to see for yourselves.

One last thing. Her section on liquid table design in Dreamweaver was the single best instruction I have read on the subject. The only reason I'm not giving 5 stars is that I haven't read this particlular version of the book.

This is only the second tutorial that I've given 5 stars.

Every time I thought I caught the author at an error, I found it the error was either mine or Dreamweaver's (a couple of times, I needed to restart the program to get results). The CD and instructions were perfectly in sync. And the book was well-organized and well-written. (I caught no typos or grammatical errors.)

I wish the CD ROM contained the exercises at various stages of completion for those couple of times when things went radically wrong due to my misstep. As I knew the error was mine and that I really didn't need to re-do my work to understand the exercise, I would have appreciated the ability to pick up with a perfectly correct page so I could take it from there.

It took me more than 15 hours to get through the exercises. I'm sure with a little more concentration and a lot more motivation, I could've completed the book in a weekend. Instead, I took my time.

Don't pass up this book if you're trying to learn how to use Dreamweaver and are reluctant to buy this one because it's one of the first Dreamweaver MX tutorials out. It's a good book for a newbie to the program and I wouldn't waste my time waiting for the publishing of other books.

I was really disappointed when I got this book. I opened it up and it was written exclusively for Windows users. :-( I wouldn't have ordered it had I known.

Additionally, the projects are not anything I will likely ever do and some of the step-by-step instructions are somewhat on the basic side and a real waste of space. (I already know how to fill a rectangular selection with colour.) Plus, the necessity of other third party softwares (which are also Windows exclusive) left me with nothing to gain from this book.

This book teaches Dreamweaver MX by using actual examples, by providing step by step instructions and finished code.

Unfortunately, there are tools (third party extensions) that are recommended and used in the tutorials but are not available for use. They are either available at additional cost or are just not compatible with this version of Dreamweaver.

This leads to nothing but frustration as key concepts cannot be explored. I am referring to concepts such as file uploads and adding records to table (with identity key). I purchased this book to bring me up to speed so that I could implement a project I'm currently working on and due to it's shortcomings I feel inclined to return it as I cannot follow the examples that I really need.

In an attempt to be fare I'll continue by saying that the author does state that the book is not for novices and that it's shortcomings can probably be worked around by reviewing the finished code. But that, I think, defeats Dreamweaver Mx's main purpose of providing server side behaviours without (much) coding. Also the code generated by MX is not the easiest thing to make sense of.

I found this book to be exactly what I needed (and had been looking for for quite a while): information that capitalized on my UD4 experience and helped make the transition to DWMX, concrete examples that led to building two great sites, a side-by-side comparison of Cold Fusion MX to help me figure out what all the CF hullabaloo was about, and a sense of humor in the writing.
As mentioned by an earlier reviewer, there is one time where the book calls for an extension that must be purchased ... and a couple of times where extensions must be utilized which reportedly do not work with MX (they do work-the author's book support site tells you how to make very minor code tweaks). This should not be enough to make anyone decide not to purchase the book. The author's book support site ... is truly supportive and helped me with above issues very quickly.
Buy the book. It's absolutely essential.

It is hard for me to criticize this book, because the example project is practical and interesting. The directions are pretty straightfoward, giving users a good command of working with 1. layers and 2. media assets like video clips and graphics.
However, this book is not the best for complete Flash beginners for several reasons. First, for complete beginners the Flash work environment is very complicated. My experience with Dreamweaver, Photoshop and HTML carried over only marginally to Flash. The book takes a very plodding approach to acquainting new users to how Flash "works." 120 pages into the book, I felt like I still had no clue WHY the directions were telling me to do certain things. For example, why do I have to put labels on the timeline? Why do I have to switch between different editing modes? etc.
The book is not very well edited, and the instructions themselves could be clearer. For example, the paraphrased step and the instructions that follow it often muddle the point of what you are doing.
For a better understanding of the "what's" and "why's" of Flash, I reccomend the Sam's Teach Yourself book on the subject. It is a better global view of the Flash authoring environment so that beginners can start projects with a better understanding of what you can accheive with Flash. Reviewers seem to enjoy it a lot. Following a better introduction to Flash, I will return to deHaan's book and will likely get more out of it.

I just finished working through this book on the holidays, and it is very easy to follow along and I learned a lot more about Flash in the end. I'm surprised in how much was covered in the 500ish pages, and it has made me less nervous about using Flash in my company. But I'm very impressed with how easy it was made and how much the website you build has in it. I expected to have a tough time because I don't know anything, but I made my way through with no problems. I even emailed with some extra questions and got an answer the next day. I have some of the older macromedia training from the source books on different programs, and this one follows the same format which I like. If you don't mind big long tutorials, then I recommend this book. The only reason I subtract a star is because I think the chapter on ActionScript was too long to be a single chapter, and it would be better in shorter amounts for the readers.

I'm not sure if I am reading the same book as these other guys here. I bought this book because I wanted to build an web application with Flash MX 2004 (not the only animate!), and learn the kinds of things it can do. You need this version of Flash to do that... and at least that's what this book does!

I really liked how it took some of the more complex things in Flash and made them really simple, which I don't think can too easy and why some of the steps are long. Maybe itis, I dont know. But I could follow along and I'm just starting out and I wasn't really bored by this book or thinking that it was confusing or anything. I'm glad I didn't read those because I wanted to build an application including all the different things and use the things in 2004 to do it and that's what this book does and you learn lots.

I bought this book because I wanted to learn this program. On the back of the book it says beiginner-advanced which is completely untrue. The book is very basic and is one I would call a "bonehead" book. The book is nice because of the pictures included but would be very confusing to a novice. This book is only good for a reference, or if you've just started learning dreamweaver, but even then, there are many other books out there such as Inside Dreamweaver MX that are much better to learn from.

I really like this book. I'm pretty good at computers but I was stumped when trying to learn Dreamweaver on my own. The book breaks learning down in to easy to follow steps, and includes information for MAC users as well, although not as frequently as I'd like. Ms. Towers has tons of personality, and it comes through in her text. Unlike the other reviewer, I like how the book is organzied. It is written very sequentially so that the reader builds upon thier skills, even if this means not learning everything there is to know about a function until a later chapter. The author always notes this, and tells the reader where to skip ahead to if they need the advanced stuff now.

I have 5 dreamweaver books that are all different. Tarin's visual quickstart guide is almost always the first book I reach for trying to find an answer. It is not always there, and it is not always clear, it is not always covering every detail, but it is the book with the least blah blah and the most to the point and step by step instructions on how to get something done. Especially for the price definitely a must have for me.

There are not many screenshots - as opposed to what also the other titles in these series might suggest - so they all should rather be called "The Peachpit QuickSTEP Guides."

There are not enough words to express how dissapointed I am about this book. It doesn't show even basic database features like how to show a one to many relationship in the same web page using list boxes or drop down lists! Many chapters simply repeat the same material: how to run the wizard to create a page that manages a single (underscore single) table record. The author has been ironic enough to show a multiple table database layout (ERD), and then not creating a single page that is able to manage more than one table! The only list boxes used are filled by hand, not dynamically from a database! Was the name of the book Dreamweaver and Databases?

Save your money, go for the online help files in the macromedia web site. I got misled by the high ratings this book got here. Don't make the same mistake. Can I get my money back?

I am a bit undecided about the book.... It does teach you some things, but at the same time you spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether your results are correct or not.

Its like the author wrote some of the book with the idea of a certain exercise resulting in 2 web pages(search page, and then result page), and then later he just shortcuts and has you make 1 web page(search and result on same page). Then he never cleans up the chapter that was talking about there being 2 pages. So you end up completing the exercise and your results do not match up with the out of exercise explanations. So very confusing. Also, references are made that you can contact a internet website to gather snippets/examples, and this information on the website is VERY incomplete... I kinda understand that stuff is offered as a service, but if you are going to offer it, then follow up on the offer... Worst case of this was for a snippets page to cut and paste text into your web pages(some of these are a paragraph in size, not that huge a deal, but still could be considered needless typing). You go to the snippets page and are greeted with a "this is where the snippets will go" greeting.. It reminded me of when I was a kid and had to type in word for word a program from a magazine to see pretty lights and music....

This book does give some decent information, it just takes a good deal of time to figure out if you are doing things correctly... Once you figure out you are doing things correctly you can go back and figure out what is being taught and how it affects the page(s) you created....

'To know how to do something is to enjoy it", this was said by the Nobel laureate Pearl Buck. This line I found in the introduction pages of the book before going through the book. This really impressed me as I also have same thoughts about learning, hence moved ahead and enjoyed reading through these pages. The author has written the book in a very interactive way and the best thing is that he is himself a developer, hence has hands on experience of developing the Applications and also is aware of the pitfalls one falls into. So at every point he even advises about such problems. The book is truly a very easy learning path for the beginners.

If you have thorough knowledge of Dreamweaver and have worked on earlier version i.e. Dreamweaver MX and are new to Databases, then this is a perfect book. All new and complicated topics related to Dynamic Applications, Database management etc has been taken in a very systematic and easy to understand way. The topics are explained in point form step by step and then the related exercise is given, so that the reader does them and keep learning about them.

The book has everything that a beginner would need for developing Dynamic Application, starting from choosing the right tool, to understanding the backend processes involved in the Database-Driven Applications etc. The book also helps you in planning your Application development and explains the Security issue your application would need. All the major technical issues like Building Database for Dynamic Applications and Web Applications, has been very well explained and in a very interactive way.

You can begin the actual hands-on process of using Dreamweaver MX 2004, Access, and ASP.NET to build an intranet and, later, SQL Server and ColdFusion to build an organizational Web site. Author has also included all of the code and other information necessary to build the book's demo applications.

Conclusively I strongly think this book is a great starting point for web developers who may have been a bit hesitant to move into dynamic database-driven sites. Written for at least moderately experienced developers, the book doesn't waste time with too much 'catch up' information and definitions.

This book is going to be an excellent resource that I envision being referenced again and again. Categorically I find the last chapter, which will help you in building your online catalog so that you are engaged in E Commerce. All difficult topics are explained in an easy way.