Get a FREE fully-working copy of Steganos Security Suite 7 (worth £49.99) when you sign up to the Practical PC Newsletter. Review: Dreamweaver 8 - Beyond The Basics
Need to get down and dirty with Dreamweaver 8? Read on...
| Product | Dreamweaver 8 - Beyond The Basics |
|---|---|
| Company | Lynda.com |
| Web | www.lynda.com |
| Price | £31.99 |
| We like | Template coverage, AJAX and sIFR details |
| We don't like | Want More! |
| Rating | 9/10 |
| Requirements |
Macromedia's Dreamweaver is the professional's web site builder of choice. Its high quality XHTML code, support for CSS and powerful features make it no surprise it's the market leader.
On the downside, most Dreamweaver books cover the basic to medium range only with very few getting in to the nitty gritty of template expressions or implementing AJAX or XML from within Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics lives up to its title and despite its fairly low page count, manages to cover a good range of topics. As the book comes from the well known lynda.com stable, it includes a CDROM containing suplementary video tutorials as well as the excercise files.
The first few chapters cover CSS, both as a layout tool and navigation creation system. Unlike most CSS books, this one shows you how Dreamweaver's own unique features can be put to use to minimise the effort involved as well as provide visual clues that make the whole process so much easier. Examples include magazine type layouts as well as the more common two and three column ones and thus cover a good range of options and variations. In many cases the author shows how certain features can help one layout but mess up others. This helps bed down the concepts nicely and the explanations are in the main nice and clear.
By far the most useful section for us was the chapter on advanced templates. Whilst extremely powerful, Dreamweaver's templating abilities are woefully under documented, especially the more interesting features like repeating regions and expressions. We'd go so far as to say Dreamweaver Beyond the Basics is worth buying just for the template coverage.
The book also features a nice section on Dreamweaver's code editing tools and covers quick tag selection, collapsing code to simplify the view and comparing code plus Dreamweaver's Coding Toolbar and how to customise Dreamweaver. It would have been nice to see a little more on some of Dreamweaver's code editing tricks and keyboard shortcuts as there is much here that many users may simply be unaware of until it's pointed out.
Other topics include XML, XSLT and RSS feeds and AJAX integration from within Dreamweaver, the latter using Adobe's Spry AJAX framework. The book also shows how to implement sIFR text which seems to be gaining popularity. For those working in teams, the check-in/check-out code management features are given a fair coverage.
The last few sections are perhaps less useful to some people as they are well enough dealt with elsewhere so the sections on forms, search engine optimizing and working with multimedia could be viewed as padding. However, they do of course show the Dreamweaver specifics so should be lauded for that.
Finally, Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics includes a short but nevertheless useful section on Dreamweaver resources. If we had to make one criticism it would be that the book left us wanting more, not in terms of what it did cover but in terms of what it didn't. It's rare that a book makes it so clear that the author knows a program rather better than most and we'd have loved a few more chapters on different aspects of Dreamweaver.
Buying the book also entitles you to a 24 hour pass on lynda.com's online training library which includes further Dreamweaver training. All in all a fine book which the author Joseph Lowery should be proud of and one that anyone ready to dig a bit deeper with Dreamweaver should stick on their shopping list.
