Unrealized Potential
This should have been an excellent book. I bought it after carefully considering many other books with similar focus (including reading the Amazon reader reviews). I've been using DW since version 2 and certainly didn't want a basic primer. This book promised to zero in on exactly what I wanted: using DWMX to create dynamic sites with ASP. All 5 authors seem to be knowledgeable and competent writers; a single author wrote each chapter. But IMO this book sorely needed editing for overall consistency and comprehensiveness. The whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.
I suppose I was expecting something structured along the lines of Wrox's "Beginning ASP Databases": an ongoing, easy-to-implement tutorial that illustrates all of the theory in a consistent manner.
But the tutorials in this book were fragmented and difficult to follow, each one using different conventions, and often omitting information (which was sometimes found in later chapters but would have been useful earlier).
I'd love to see a second edition of this book that takes all of this information but presents it in a more cohesive manner. As it is, in order to set up PWS and get any of the examples to work, I had to rely heavily on other books and online tutorials (notably the Webthang tutorials for DWMX). It's been an exercise in frustration.
Very Poor Book. Buy something written by better authors
This book was a total let down.I had great hopes when I scanned the contents of the book, but the whole book is badly written, and gives an overall impression of being rushed through.
There are far better books for creating dynamic sites with Macromedia products, and I strongy urge anyone to seek alternative reading.
Very disappointing.
Dynamic Dreamweaver MX
I went through this book and can now design dynamic data-driven ASP pages. Since Macromedia is focused on Cold-Fusion it is a relief to have a reference that explains using DreamweaverMX with ASP. There are more hosting providers available offering ASP hosting (at a reasonable price) than offer Cold Fusion (usually adds 20 or more US dollars a month to the base cost of hosting). So it is "cheaper" to work with ASP. I found this book to be very helpful and highly recommend this to anyone who wants to move from static pages to dynamic. It covers all the basics you would need to connect to a database and build recordsets and use the behaviors in DWMX. There is tons of info on the internet also. This book taught me a lot in a short amount of time and then I found all sorts of sites on the internet that had tutorials or free downloads. After reading this book I was able to understand the things on these various websites. I could then zero-in on a particular solution to something I was doing for a client's site and get the answer either from the book or from an online source. The foundation I got from this book has enabled me to dive deeper into DWMX and take better advantage of its many tools. I had a design background (Quark, Illustrator etc) and needed to make the jump to the "dark side" - programming and handcoding. This book de-mystified those scary subjects and I am now seeing lines of code in my sleep.
Rubbish
This book is not for beginners. So if your new to data driven web sites, This book is not for you. Its starts of with just a few pages telling you about the new advances made within dreamweaver and just dives straight in at the deep end about the dynamic stuff. WHY CAN'T THESE AUTHORS WRITE IN A SIMPLE MANNER? They seem to assume that evrybody knows as much as them. Anyhow can I have my money back, please?
Good information, but inconsistent behaviors confuse users
Being a beginner to the world of database driven web applications I found this book somewhat useful. My only major beef with the book is that in my experience using the tutorials and exercises and trying to apply them to ASP.NET, the screens and server behaviors didn't match up correctly leaving me scratching my head and randomly searching Dreamweaver's pull-down menus for the correct item to match my current tutorial step? Now I'm not sure if this book was just too early for the .NET world and I am trying to apply the latest and greatest technology to a inappropriate book or if the marketing for this book was just too ambitious? Overall a decent book, but don't bank on this being your "bible" if you are working in ASP.NET.
(10 reviews)
