Dreamweaver 3 for Dummies
by Janine Warner, Paul Vachier

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Book Reviews of Dreamweaver 3 for Dummies

Book Review: Haphazard. Unnecessarily difficult for beginners.
Summary: 3 Stars

The opening chapters were rambling and repetitive with useful details mentioned in passing, For example, shift+enter is a line break and the enter key is a paragraph break. I missed this the first time around and, after finding the function by accident, spotted it in the book's text by chance.

The way in which table-sizing was handled was also clumsy: all you have to do is use the mouse and click and drag the sizing handles like in other programmes instead of always going through the property inspector.

Too much space was spent in giving examples of other peoples' work which wasn't particularly poignant (18oz being a remarkable piece of nonsense) and, more often than not, a contradiction to the better practices preached.

Okay, the book covers a lot: Dreamweaver 3, Fireworks 3, and Flash 4. But in rather an unnecessarily schematic way within the space provided to avoid the feeling that I should be reading something more advanced and which still covered the opening basics.

Nevertheless it's reasonable value at the price.

Summary of Dreamweaver 3 for Dummies

For users who created their sites using another Web authoring application, the author dedicates a chapter to common conversion problems in Macromedia's software. Users starting from scratch will find an extensive chapter on site planning, such as deciding on functionality goals and targeting your audience.

The book begins with a review of the work environment. Then it's on to creating a site and working with the site management tools. Efficiently working with Dreamweaver requires a thorough understanding of features like Templates, the Library, Tracing Image, and History palette. This Dummies guide does a good job of showing not only how to use these, but why they're important for optimizing the creation and maintenance of your site.

This book also features a section on creating images with Fireworks 3 and using them within Dreamweaver. Dynamic HTML, layers, and behaviors are covered, including more advanced uses of these features in timeline animations. Adding multimedia like Shockwave or Flash movies, or including Java or ActiveX, may exceed early aspirations for readers of this book, yet the guide clearly explains the many options offered for implementing these enhancements.

The book concludes by analyzing sites created with Dreamweaver and offers some design and timesaving tips (including a list of online resources). The CD-ROM holds trial versions of the software plus numerous plug-ins such as HTML Rename!, a filename conversion program useful for cross-platform work. You'll also find extra behaviors and templates, sample images and Flash files, to supplement the learning process and a glossary of Web and Dreamweaver lingo useful for beginners. --Angelynn Grant

Topics covered: Basic instruction on using Dreamweaver 3, including creating a site, pages, formatting text, placing images, making links, working with tables, forms, frames, DHTML, and plug-ins; creating graphics in Fireworks 3 and integrating them in Dreamweaver. CD-ROM includes 30-day trial versions of Dreamweaver 3 and Fireworks 3, HTML Rename!, demo versions of companion software like BBEdit Lite 4.6 and the latest browsers, extra Dreamweaver behaviors and templates and sample images and Flash animations.

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