multimedia

(...) I was reluctant to buy this book. This book is not for the complete novice. You need to have a very basic understanding of HTML. What this book does is give you a very good over view of both Dreamweaver 4 and Flash 5. It then goes two steps further. It shows how you can use both programs together, easily, and it shows some advance functions of Flash 5.0. If you have both programs, and have a little hands on experience this is the ideal book for you. The two things that ended up being the deciding factor on getting this book was how clearly they show you where things are. This was very important to me, as my wife wanted to learn both programs and would be able to do so easily. Next, I sat down and compared this one book to two other books I was considering buying. (One was an Dreamweaver 4 book and the other a Flash 5 book.) In doing so I found that this book covered nearly everything they did, but offered the additional information on using the programs together and advance features of Flash. Price wise, it was cheaper buying this one book then buying the two.

This book is a waste of money. If you want a great guide to Dreamweaver 4, this is about as far from one as you can get. There is more about Flash 5 than Dreamweaver, and there are more pictures than text. I'd suggest to leave this one on the shelf and check out Dreamweaver 4: The Complete Reference. You won't be dissappointed with that one.

Will someone hand me some crayons, because I don't know of any other use for this COLORING BOOK!!!

I bought this book as a student who needed a quick reference to do homework assignments. For instance, one homework assignment was to make a template. I knew nada about Dreamweaver, so a wordy tutorial was over my head. I picked this picture filled book up and not only made a template, but understood it! Each step illustrated by lines pointing to the the screen shot menus blew me away! Oh the ease for a newbie like me. Must be paradise. But the honeymoon ended when I bought it and needed to actually make my first web page start to finish.

The chapters jump from one topic to another. It's like several folks were working on this book who didn't communicate. There's no sequential order, just chaos. There's no troubleshooting either. If you follow steps 1-5 and they don't work, there's no "If it doesn't work, do ___" or "make sure you do ___ or it won't work." Oh, the headaches!

I use it as a quick visual reference every now and then. But I regret spending the money because I could get references from online user tutorials. I'll never buy another book in this series again, unles of course I know a child who needs a coloring book :)