Macromedia Dreamweaver Mx 2004 With Asp, Coldfusion, and Php: Training from the Source

The purpose of this book (in my opinion) is to teach you how to use Dreamweaver MX 2004 to create dynamic (database-driven) web sites. It doesn't teach you all there is to know about Dreamweaver, about scripting languages, or about databases. Rather, it shows you how they all tie together. Yes, it will teach you a little about Dreamweaver, because you will be using it for all the lessons. Yes, it will teach you a little about scripting languages, and yes it will teach you a little about databases. You don't need to already know these things to do the exercises or understand the lessons, because the author clearly explains everything you do. However, these topics are covered more completely in more specialized books.What this book does is show you how you can use Dreamweaver to accomplish a complete database-driven web site. Keeping this in mind, I thought the book was excellent.The book takes you through the complete process of starting with a simple static site and converting it to a dynamic site (a challenge many web developers face). The first half of the book introduces you to the site and has you converting it from HTML to XHTML. This is a simple task, and Dreamweaver has a function to do that automatically, but the author here shows you exactly what needs to be done and how to do it manually by using search and replace. He then shows how to convert the site to use a simple CSS file. He shows how to use forms, how to pass data between pages, and how to use scripting languages to build a simple calculator.Okay, you say, that's pretty basic stuff, and I may skip those chapters. That's what I said, but I decided to read every word and do every exercise anyway. I'm glad I did, because there are many gems buried there. Dreamweaver can make even simple tasks more efficient with its built-in capabilities that I didn't know existed even though I've been using Dreamweaver for years. So, skip the first few lessons if you want, but I suggest you do it all.The last half of the book has you working with database functions and learning how Dreamweaver ties these together with forms and GET/POST value passing. Dreamweaver really has some fantastic capabilities in this area and it seems that you can create complete database-driven pages with just a few clicks of the mouse. Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but Dreamweaver does easily generate complex code and puts it into your page for you. The author shows you how to use those capabilities.Finally, in the last lesson, you generate the pages that update the database by just using the scripting language functions, and not using the Dreamweaver capabilities. Whatever you do, be sure to do this lesson, as it shows you all the work Dreamweaver is doing in the background for you.Armed with the knowledge from this book, and the books I already have on Dreamweaver, HTML, CSS, PHP and MySQL, I feel I can now attack a dynamic site. When I get in trouble, I can refer to the snippets of code in the book to help me get on track.

I found his book amazing! It's the best book I have read to understand, what I thought would be very complicated to learn. The best part for me, a beginner with Cold Fusion, is learning how to use Macromedia's Dreamweaver MX 2004's tools to create cold fusion pages quickly and easily. The book uses a complete website example to step through various types of dynamic web pages and coding. The book includes helpful screen examples of the design and code view allowing me to compare my creations to expected outcomes. To pick up things I might have missed in the first reading, I went through the book completely a second time, and found things I didn't remember the first time through that I am using in my daily web designing. I keep referring back to the book and the accompaning CD for reference. For a beginner, wanting to learn to create dynamic pages, this is a must! Thank you Jeff Bardzell for putting out such a wonderful and useful book!

I bought this book because Macromedia didn't provide any manuals with their Studio MX 2004, other than some useless PDF files, and I wanted to know how to use the new MX 2004 version. I thought that this book would have the usual crud with a few pearls of information that in the end would probably make it worth the price. Instead, I found a book that is pure gold. It's well written and if you stay with it, it will teach you quite a bit. If I was to teach a course on Dreamweaver MX 2004, this would be my manual.

This book is excellent! We highly recommend it. Jeffery Bardzell handles the matter of building a dynamic website with exact step by step examples and builds the sample Newland Tours website. This book is identical to Macromedia's "Dreamweaver MX Dynamic Applications" training from the source, except that this book has PHP references in it as well. Therefore if you have that book, you don't need this one and visa versa.

I can't recommend this book highly enough! I'd worked with static sites for years and was learning to hosh-posh sites together with some dynamic content. Many pieces are coming together now in my head thanks to this book. It offers great examples and the 'why' behind what you're doing. I wish Jeffrey Bardzell wrote a book on Flash...

As Advertised.

Nice book for beginners. However, not a book for programmers. What little code view you can see is constantly cut off so you cannot see the complete code. A lot of guess work is involved. Also, the code that is spelled out within the text does not stand out so it tends to blend into the text a little too easily. On a positive note, this book does give you a good overview of the basics of dynamic web programming.

This book is great for someone who has been teaching themselves web design. This book helped me go from using out-dated HTML 4.0 code to XHTML in a matter of a few days. A must have book for anyone learning web design.