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Hats off to Glasshaus and kudos to the authors! Andrew, Elbaga, Foley, Regan, and Turnbull have not forgotten what it was like to be a beginner! Dynamic Dreamweaver MX is not just for beginners though. The book takes you through the stages of developing a dynamic website from Introducing Dreamweaver MX to Advanced Techniques. The reader is given a solid foundation on which to build. Concepts are fully explained and reinforced with hands-on tasks. I found it amazing that so much valuable information could be found in just 358 pages! This book has helped me understand not only the "how to" but, more importantly, the "why". The only question I have now is "why did it take so long for a book like this to be published"?

Added note. Do not confuse .asp with asp.net. they are two separate server technologies. this book covers conventional asp, not the newer .net.

I went through this book and can now design dynamic data-driven ASP pages. Since Macromedia is focused on Cold-Fusion it is a relief to have a reference that explains using DreamweaverMX with ASP. There are more hosting providers available offering ASP hosting (at a reasonable price) than offer Cold Fusion (usually adds 20 or more US dollars a month to the base cost of hosting). So it is "cheaper" to work with ASP. I found this book to be very helpful and highly recommend this to anyone who wants to move from static pages to dynamic. It covers all the basics you would need to connect to a database and build recordsets and use the behaviors in DWMX. There is tons of info on the internet also. This book taught me a lot in a short amount of time and then I found all sorts of sites on the internet that had tutorials or free downloads. After reading this book I was able to understand the things on these various websites. I could then zero-in on a particular solution to something I was doing for a client's site and get the answer either from the book or from an online source. The foundation I got from this book has enabled me to dive deeper into DWMX and take better advantage of its many tools. I had a design background (Quark, Illustrator etc) and needed to make the jump to the "dark side" - programming and handcoding. This book de-mystified those scary subjects and I am now seeing lines of code in my sleep.

This should have been an excellent book. I bought it after carefully considering many other books with similar focus (including reading the Amazon reader reviews). I've been using DW since version 2 and certainly didn't want a basic primer. This book promised to zero in on exactly what I wanted: using DWMX to create dynamic sites with ASP.

All 5 authors seem to be knowledgeable and competent writers; a single author wrote each chapter. But IMO this book sorely needed editing for overall consistency and comprehensiveness. The whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

I suppose I was expecting something structured along the lines of Wrox's "Beginning ASP Databases": an ongoing, easy-to-implement tutorial that illustrates all of the theory in a consistent manner.

But the tutorials in this book were fragmented and difficult to follow, each one using different conventions, and often omitting information (which was sometimes found in later chapters but would have been useful earlier).

I'd love to see a second edition of this book that takes all of this information but presents it in a more cohesive manner. As it is, in order to set up PWS and get any of the examples to work, I had to rely heavily on other books and online tutorials (notably the Webthang tutorials for DWMX). It's been an exercise in frustration.