Dreamweaver 8 Design and Construction
reviewed by Robert Pritchett
Author: Marc Campbell http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/view/au/2391 Booksite: http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/dreamwvrmx/index.html Published: January 2006. Pages: 312 $40 USD, $56 CND, £28.50 GBP, 35€ EUR ISBN: 0596101635 Requirements: Dreamweaver 8 For those beginning with Dreamweaver who want to know the basics. Strengths: Takes the architectural approach to building websites. Weaknesses: None found. |
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Dreamweaver 8 Design and Construction by Marc Campbell is, well shall we say, a well constructed, easy-reading book with a slick cover, wide margins for sidebar information and a color scheme I wished more books would emulate (light blue margins).
There are four parts designed to get us up to speed quickly. Part One has something I haven’t seen before. It goes into detail about getting the right tools for our technical toolboxes, whether Windows or Macs. Then it talks about webhosts, organizing content, sketching the interface, preparing images and text, and setting up a site. Part Two discusses designing a site with tables, layers and using stylesheets. Part Three gets into bu9ildign a side by adding navigation bars, text, images, Flash content, links and something I learned more about – forms. Part Four finishes up with publishing the site by tuning, testing and troubleshooting before going live. There are also three appendices on HTML tags, CSS style definitions and Javascript Event handling.
The sidebar TechTalk sections pretty much summarize the main text and these are interspersed with Tips and figures that straddle the margins and the bodytext areas nicely. There are also Behind the Scenes sections and a few Best Bets for digging deeper.
Marc Campbell has years of experience and he obviously is comfortable with this topic because his teaching style makes the reader feel comfortable and at ease.
This is a great book from the O’Reilly Digital Studio series and is a great place to start if you need to sit down and read a tangible book before you “go digital”.
