Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Hands-On Training by Garrick Chow
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Book Reviews of Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Hands-On Training
Book Review: decent guidebook
Summary: 3 Stars
This instructional book was for a Dreamweaver class I took, so a required text. While this book was decent as far as tutorials go, it would not be my first choice. The Thomson Course Technology series (I believe by Botello) was much more thorough and had a better layout for students.Book Review: Very good, but what about frames?
Summary: 3 Stars
This was a great book for me, who is switching from GoLive. The section on CSS was very detailed and contained just the information I needed to get started with CSS. However, there is no discussion of frames at all.Book Review: Not for Beginners or Non-Technical People
Summary: 2 Stars
It's sad to see a book this thorough be all but useless for anyone but a techno-geek. The first chapter is a good general discussion of The Direction Things Are Going. The second chapter, including a "tutorial" video, shows you a glimpse of literally everything in the program. Imagine that you've never seen a car before; you know only that it's a good device for tooling down the road. This chapter is like walking into the auto dealership and having someone show you the exterior, the interior, the engine, and all the latest fancy buttons, without your having the faintest idea even what "gas pedal" means.
Once you get into chapters 3 and 4, you're performing hands-on work -- much of it out of context with anything that you might ever have considered or worked with before. Using the car analogy again, the salesman (author) assumes that you've driven a car before, but an old and clunky one. Look, this one has gold-plated digital turn signal interfaces! It's got a what??? You have some idea of what's going on, yet you feel lost, wondering if perhaps you will either have to walk (never have a website) or hire a chauffeur (pay someone big bucks to get you there).
If you've already built websites with other programs, and you want to see how to do so in DreamWeaver, this is probably a good book. If you are, like me, a comparative newbie who once danced with FrontPage but otherwise needs a good deal of hand-holding to enter this brave new world of XHTML, CSS, another alphabetic jargon and folderol, I suggest that we'd be better off with a book that empathizes and holds our hands ... such as the "For Dummies" series, which I highly recommend.
Book Review: Not a book for Beginners
Summary: 2 Stars
This is a very thorough book, covering almost all aspects of Dreamweaver. However the author assumes that the reader already has a pretty good understanding of computer programs and web design. This book was assigned to me as the textbook for a Dreamweaver course at a local college. Most of the students, including me, had a very hard time understanding much of the terms used in this book, even in the first chapter.
Just so you know what I'm talking about, here are some quotes from the FIRST chapter. "Sure, you could use other technologies such as Java Script and CSS and server-side languages such as ASP, JSP, Adobe ColdFusion and such." "DHTML uses a combination of XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, and the DOM." "Web applications have also been referred to as data-driven, database-driven, and dynamic sites. In almost all cases, a Web application involves a database and server-side scripting, such as ASP, Adobe ColdFusion, PHP, and so on." I don't know about you, but I have no idea what the author is talking about.
I think that if you are pretty savvy about computer programming in general, or have worked with HTML before, or if you know other Adobe programs such as Photoshop, then you are probably at a level where you can take advantage of the information in this book. If, however, you are new to web design and HTML like I am, then there must be other books that explain Dreamweaver in a more simplistic way for beginners.
Book Review: Awful experience with this book
Summary: 2 Stars
This was my textbook for a Dreamweaver course, and it was absolutely worthless in terms of teaching me how to create a Web site from scratch. The CD-Rom exercises are structured around a pre-built Web site. While the exercises were somewhat useful, I learned absolutely nothing about how to build a site from the ground up.
Other gripes:
* Concepts are explained poorly.
* Explanations of new terms are often tautological. For example, when defining class selectors for the first time, the book says, "They let you define a class that you can apply to multiple elements using a class attribute." And that's it. That's your definition of a class. No more explanations are provided.
* The book tells you what decisions to make, but not why you should make them. You are told to never do certain things in Dreamweaver, but without being told why not. It seems that the author just wants you to follow his instructions blindly, without questioning the rationale or the context for what he is saying.
* While many key actions are illustrated with screen shots, not all of them are.
* Errors galore!
If I had a birdcage or a kitty litter box, I would use the pages of this book to line them. Unfortunately, I have neither a bird nor a cat. Looks like this horrible book is going in the trash.