Everything web designers need to build sites with Dreamweaver Dreamweaver is the leading website creation tool, with 90 percent of the market share. The nine minibooks that make up this guide cover getting started with Dreamweaver CS5, creating and publishing great sites, making pages dynamic, building web applications, and much more, including all the upgrades in Dreamweaver CS5. Dreamweaver CS5 All-in-One For Dummies gives web designers essential information for creating, managing, and maintaining all types of websites.
Richard Wagner, the former chief architect of NetObjects ScriptBuilder and the primary author of the ECMAScript Components standard, is currently in charge of development tools at Nombas, Inc.
Book Review: DreamWeaver CS5 for Dummies (9 books in 1) by Sue Jenkins and Richard Wagner
Weighing in at over 800 pages, this book is a bit daunting. However, the author assures the reader that they can take what they like and leave the rest, only reading and using the portions that interest them at the moment. Thus encouraged, I jumped into Book VII: Building Web Applications since I want to move my static personal site into a dynamic one. I’ve used DreamWeaver for a number of years, but recently upgraded from CS2 to CS5. I felt I had a rudimentary knowledge of the basics so could skip earlier chapters.
Jumping right in didn’t work for me. While it is quite possible for a web programmer to get from point a to point b by jumping in, I think I need to learn about things in previous chapters to be able to make heads or tails of the more technical instructions. In Book VII at least there is a lot of technical stuff as the author’s call it.
So I gave up on pHp, mySQL and ASP database connections and moved onto a chapter about keeping my code clean. This is something I have done in the past, but found frustrating to accomplish because the inspector will tell you where there is trouble with your code but not how to fix it.
On page 484 the section on validating your code begins. The first instruction was to click the green Validate arrow icon on the validation tab. My workspace for DreamWeaver didn’t have a validation window and I spent several fruitless minutes trying to find how to open it. I looked back at the book and realized that the bold text instructions only told half the story. The regular weight text underneath the instruction does mention to go under File -> Validate -> Markup. I guess I should claim operator error for not reading the four paragraphs below the bold text before trying to validate my code.
There were several minor code errors on my page listed on the tab report section. Instruction 2 in bold text told me to double click on the error message in the Validation tab list. I was instructed to right-click to get more information. This garnered a new window popping up with the exact same text as in the validation tab. So not helpful.
The next few instructions told me how to save the report or how to view the report in the browser. Okay, then. I have several errors, but no clue where to go to get information to actually fix them. To my mind this would be very important information. A link to code syntax or some other similar hint would have been beneficial.
I still want to learn how to make dynamic websites and upload pages with pristine code, but I doubt that this book will be my go-to for such tasks in the future. I found it too technical and lacking in information at the same time.