Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual Book

Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual is worth having on hand as you learn to use Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004, the leading software tool for the creation of websites and other HTML interfaces. Dreamweaver is remarkably capable, able to deal intelligently with everything from fonts and images to JavaScript for client-side data validation and embedded Java applets. In most cases, Dreamweaver will save you time over hand-coding--and yield better-looking pages to boot. The program's learning curve, though, isn't trivial. David McFarland wrote this book, but the influence of esteemed series editor David Pogue is obvious in the careful coverage of features and frequent touches of humour (books about applications can be dull; the books in Pogue's Missing Manual series consistently manage to avoid this problem while maintaining comprehensiveness). The two men treat Dreamweaver's numerous features (and the even more numerous ways of putting them to use) cleverly, with a combination of procedures and side information that clarifies many oddball situations as well as straightforward conditions. One thing: all the screen shots show the Mac OS implementation of Dreamweaver. The text alone addresses the (few) differences that appear in the Microsoft Windows version. --David Wall, Amazon.comTopics covered: How to create HTML (XHTML and CSS, strictly speaking) documents using Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004. In addition to the basic stuff (text, images, links and frames), the book shows you how to build forms for data submission and embed Flash movies and Java applets. There's also a lot of helpful emphasis on Dreamweaver's productivity features, including snippet libraries and file-transfer utilities. A special section shows you how to do some server-side work with databases --Simon Priestley, Amazon.com.Read More