software design

Dreamweaver is a great program for building a full website. I have as many as 40 pages spun off one template, and about 80% of all my website pages are template pages. It's a real timesaver. Dreamweaver makes using templates for similar webpages easy. Unfortunately, Macromedia's documentation is often dry and a little tedious to try and understand. Fortunately, we have How To books we can count on to make things easier. This book by Warner and Gardner is the best I could find in the bookstore, and I think you'll find it very useful as I did.

Here's a little secret: HTML is easy. A good, useable, expandable Web site, though, that's a lot harder, and Dreamweaver is the tool that every professional Web developer I know uses; it's the Mack truck of Web editors. Susannah Gardner and Janine Warner should get a medal for writing a Dummies book for this mega-program, and for doing such a good job with it, that medal ought to be gold. In a mere 390 pages, they cover: Defining and planning Web sites, streamlining your work with templates and library items, working with images, HTML tables, frames, layers, DHTML, JavaScript "behaviors" (as Dreamweaver calls them), integrating with other Macromedia programs like Flash and Fireworks, using forms, and integrating dynamic (i.e. database driven) content. Whew! I recommend the book for anyone who is new to the program, and wants to start out leaning the basics and go all the way to the most advanced uses. However, if you're already an expert Web developer and need more depth on a particular area of Web development, you may want to pick up a different book specific to the task you're trying to do (database integration, for example). What this book does is give you a complete VIP tour of the program, and explain what every part of it can be used for. It's a great first book. Oh, one more thing: The 2004 version of Dreamweaver has a few new changes, including: it handles MS Office importing better, and though it's not yet perfect, it's much better at handling CSS now; if that's important to you, you should upgrade, and get this book.

I've been wanting to learn to develop Web pages for a while and I finally made it my New Year's resultion to figure out how. Thank you so much for helping me not feel like a "dummie" and making it so easy to put up my first Web site. I'm still a college student but now that I've gotten my resume and other info online, I know I have a much better chance of getting a job when I graduate this spring!