6/19/06

Book Review

Dreamweaver MX H.O.T
Hands on Training

 

If you already read the article Webpage Building 101, about getting started building webpages, great. In it, I mentioned some other books on building webpages. This book, by far, was the best of the bunch.

If you're gung-ho about getting to finally make a working website in Dreaweaver, then this book is where to start. Every chapter is about a different piece of the webpage, yet you are working on the same Bonsai-Tree themed webpage throughout the whole book.

Each chapter is like learning about a different piece of a car. By the time you finish the book, you know about all the pieces and how they work togethor to complete the car.

The best part of this book is how it got me into the habit of properly setting up sites in Dreamweaver. (This is the first thing you do in Dreamweaver) I know, I know, it sounds simple, but it can be frustrating, especially for newecomers who don't know how Dreamweaver works.

Oh- and also the book revealed the mystery of folder hierarchies and file organization within a website- something other books were weak on, or didn't cover at all. Seeing it and working with it the hands-on way was just so much easier for me.

The book covered things as simple as HTML and as advanced as CSS! I never thought I would be able to use CSS so soon, and I still don't know how to code it, but you can manage it all within Dreamweaver, without having to know CSS! Pretty Slick.

Also covered are flash buttons and animated rollovers- which also can be generated without ever leaving Dreamweaver's workspace.

The meat and potatoes of sites was all covered well. These are the things all beginners want to learn. Things like tables, HTML, formatting, fonts, pictures, layouts, linking, and it even included a nice trick for making tables with rounded corners! So that's how all those trendy looking sites do that!

I'm not going to go into great detail about specific chapters in the book. I read the book cover to cover in sequencial order, but I'm sure people who are more advanced could skip around and still learn a ton of new tricks. (Yes, did I mention this book is full of great tricks?) It definetly is a book worth owning as a reference as well.

 

And finally, here are some reasons why this book was better then other books I read on the same subject.

 

- It has plenty of pictures. I would say there is more space devoted to pictures then text. The button, or menu, mentioned in text is circled in the picture, to minize the time spent searching for it. Ever spent 20 minutes just looking for a button a book mentions in a paragraph, without any pictures to help you find it? I have. This book minimizes the chance of that happening. - It reads really fast, partially becuase it has lots of pictures, but also becuase it is written well. It has a fun, humourous tone, and often uses emoticons ;). - Working with the website on the CD included with the book introduces you to working with a nice palette of colors, and the best looking fonts. Before you know it, you'll be automatically selecting more palatable palettes (no pun intended) of color, and the most approprate fonts, just from the habits you learn from reading this book and doing the excercises. - The book is well laid out from a graphic design standpoint. It's nice graphics, use of space, and typography make it more enjoyable to read then those plain, BOX-O-TEXT-on-evey-page books.

So go get a copy of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX HOT Hands-On-Training, by Garo Green and Abigail Rudner.

It's worth it. It's not dry like the others. Its a juicy 679 pages.

-Doug

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