Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual - Softcover

McFarland, David Sawyer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0596000979 ISBN 13: 9780596000974

Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc, 2001

Synopsis

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, well-designed, WYSIWYG environment for building cross-platform, cross-browser web sites; but unlike most visual editors, it doesn't clutter up the underlying HTML code by inserting unnecessary tags that make large web sites difficult to manage. Dreamweaver is a favorite of multimedia designers, thanks to its smooth integration with other Macromedia applications like Flash and Shockwave.Dreamweaver 4 extends Macromedia's lead in the web-design market. The new, more sophisticated Version 4 incorporates the latest developments in browser technologies--and the best way to get the full advantage of these improved features is with Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual, the ideal companion to this complex software. Under the guidance of Missing Manual series editor David Pogue, author Dave McFarland brings Dreamweaver 4 to life with clarity, authority, and good humor.After orienting you with an anatomical tour of a web page, the book walks you through the entire process of creating and designing a complete web site. Along the way, a unique "live examples" approach lets you see and test, on the actual Internet, real web pages that follow the development progress of the book's chapters. Armed with this book, both first-time and experienced web designers can easily use Dreamweaver to bring stunning, interactive web sites to life.

About this title

Review:

Macromedia Dreamweaver ranks among the most popular tools for developing and managing Web sites, but because it's different from the ordinary office productivity software with which we're all familiar, there's a need for an explanatory book on the program. Dreamweaver 4: The Missing Manual takes that role, showing its readers how to build and modify everything from tables to basic Flash animations. To the credit of author David McFarland, the book usually manages to carry out its instructive role while neither confusing nor patronizing its readers. There's enough detail in these pages to guarantee they'll remain useful for a long time, and enough patient text and graphics (mostly small, detailed screen shots) to help users up the steepest parts of the Dreamweaver learning curve.

As is the case with all of the Missing Manual books, this one uses an excellent style for its procedures. Rather than treating procedures as sequences of inflexible directives, as do many user-lever books, this book allows for the fact that the person reading the procedures has a brain and may want to do something that deviates from the example. For that reason, McFarland explains the options that appear at each point along the way as he details a procedure, and explains why you might want to take alternative actions. He's also good about explaining HTML conventions, like the supremacy of specified table width over specified column widths. One might wish for more coverage of the server-side routines to which forms submit their contents, but what's here is excellent. --David Wall

Topics covered: How to use Macromedia Dreamweaver 4 to create and maintain Web sites. Billing itself as "the book that should have been in the box," this volume explains text formatting, hyperlinking, tables, frames, forms, and other aspects of site design and management via the Dreamweaver interface.

About the Author:

David Sawyer McFarland is the president of Sawyer McFarland Media Inc., a web development and training company located in Portland, Oregon. In addition, he teaches JavaScript programming, Flash, and web design at the University of California, Berkeley, the Center for Electronic Art, the Academy of Art College, and Ex'Pression College for Digital Arts. He was formerly the webmaster at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center. David is also the author of CSS: The Missing Manual and Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual.

About this edition

• Publisher: Oreilly & Associates Inc
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0596000979
• ISBN 13: 9780596000974
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 420