Dreamweaver MX Web Development

Product Review: Page (1) of 1 - 09/23/02

Dreamweaver MX Web Development This book already assumes you have a strong working knowledge of Dreamweaver By Adam Bell

Dreamweaver MX Web Development
Drew McLellan
New Riders
$45.00 US/$69.99 CAN
580 Pages
click on image to buy

With Dreamweaver being the premier web development application going, there are probably more books on this one program than any other (Only Flash has probably more, but that's a different tool.) Most are introductory books while some show off cool but mostly useless DHTML or Style Sheet tips.

Dreamweaver MX Web Development doesn't fit into either category. In some ways, this isn't even a Dreamweaver book at all.

This book already assumes you have a strong working knowledge of Dreamweaver as this is no beginners book. Instead, this book shows you advanced ways of how to manage your websites more usefully and as a result, much more successfully. Examples are shown as how to use Dreamweaver Templates, Layouts, Snippets, Behaviors and Commands and which ones are really useful. Even the chapter on frames explains that while frame-based sites are mostly no-no's, the book does show when frame-based sites are really a good idea or at least should be considered.

One thing that should be mentioned are this is not some Dreamweaver tutorial book but more of a web development book in general. There are a number of chapters in the middle of the book that hardly talk about Dreamweaver at all. Many of the examples in this book could relate to using any HTML editing program whether it be GoLive, FrontPage or even the old coding by hand. Indeed, many examples in the book explain you can only accomplish these functions by entering Dreamweaver's code view and actually doing the ol' typing by hand (or at least a couple of fingers anyway.) A great example of this is a chart Drew includes showing off a wide variety of color choices you might want in your web palette and showing off its' HTML Hexidecimal name as well as it's RGB palette scheme as well. Excellent! The colors are listed in the chart whether the colors are web safe or not since the days of just using 216 web safe colors are about to go away very soon.

Overall, this is an excellent web development book, but please do not buy this as your only Dreamweaver book. Consider this an overall addition to your web design library instead but you still may need a Dreamweaver Bible-like book as well.

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Adam Bell is the Design Director, CEO, Videographer and sometimes janitor with dzign@datatv.com (http://datatv.com/) amazingly not getting plastered in the French Quarter of New Orleans, LA.