Dreamweaver the Missing Manual

By David Sawyer McFarland

About this Book
Dreamweaver CS4 The Missing Manual is a 1,064 page book. This is not a book you will want to put under your pillow at night, however you may want to use it as an exercise weight (it’s a BIG heavy book).

Seriously, this is a very good book for the beginner, intermediate or advanced Dreamweaver user. The book contains a comprehensive table of contents where materials can be easily found and accessed quickly without having to dig through the index at the back of the book (although the index is also thorough). The book is more of a “how to” book with step-by-step instructions than simply a reference manual.


The book is well organized into six basic parts of:
1. Building a Web Page
2. Building a Better Web Page
3. Bringing your Pages to Life
4. Building a Web Site
5. Dreamweaver Power
6. Dynamic Dreamweaver

For the beginner, section one is comprehensive enough that you can adequately build a small static website. Part two gets into more in-depth use of Cascading Style Sheets (liquid layouts, fixed layouts, elastic layouts, positioning of elements, navigation, etc.). In part three, Forms, inserting Flash movies, and Spry menus (drop down and fly out menus) are covered. Part four covers the intricate details of publishing your site to an Internet server and testing your site. Part five describes the use of templates and snippets (reusable HTML code) to standardize web pages layouts for large sites. In part six, dynamic website development (accessing a database) is covered. With Dreamweaver you can link to a database (MySQL, MS Access, Cold Fusion --- not SQL Server) and use Dreamweaver's wizards to help you create dynamic web sites.

Exercises are embedded into the chapters so that you can work through examples and see what the real pages look like “on the web”. The exercise files are on the web at www.missingmanuals.com (click on the CD icon) along with links to working pages on the web of the solutions.

About the Author
The author David Sawyer McFarland has been a web developer since 1995 and has been using and teaching Dreamweaver since version 2. He currently teaches at Portland State University in Oregon.