Straightforward Approach to Learning a Simple Software Application
I just created a website in Dreamweaver for a client with the end expectation that they would be able to use Contribute to edit their site without a lot of headache. Contribute proved to be absolutely simple to setup and use for this task after I read through this book.
With a single reading, I fully understood how Contribute works for the end-user and what to anticipate in the way of questions, and how to setup and administer a Contribute-editable site for multiple users with multiple levels of permissions.
I even learned from this book how to accomplish something I needed to do for the site as whole and had become tired of reading copious amounts of text looking for simple solutions. It was right there in Contribute's edit features, and as far as I can tell is nowhere to be found in Dreamweaver.
As to another reviewer's comments on the size of the graphics, unlike other Visual Quickstart Guide's, this one covers a pretty straight-forward piece of software and the images in the book were there to show what you should see on the screen; from there being able to read the little bit of text on the menu, etc. in the book is unnecessary as you have on the screen...nothing so complex as 10-step photo editing process in Photoshop.
To sum it all up: this book will answer all of your questions...it did mine.
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A Guide to my Book Rating System:
1 star = The wood pulp would have been better utilized as toilet paper.
2 stars = Don't bother, clean your bathroom instead.
3 stars = Wasn't a waste of time, but it was time wasted.
4 stars = Good book, but not life altering.
5 stars = This book changed my world in at least some small way.
disappointing
I have in the past eagerly bought books from the Visual Quickstart Guide series, but this one is a terrible disappointment. It has all the weaknesses of the series (such as tiny font in the screen snapshots), and none of the strength.
The great strength of the series was the profuse use of screen snapshots with callbacks. This is absent here. The graphics are minimal, and the text sometimes refers to an unspecified picture ten pages earlier or to no picture at all that i can discover.
My adivice is just to forget about this book.
Highly recomended
If you are going to use Contribute for anything more than the very basics, I highly recommend this book. As of this writing it is the only book I know of about Contribute 3 that is really written for version 3 and not a version 2 book with new graphics.
Contribute has an excellent help system but it is essentially a separate program (HTML based) and you are forced to switch back and forth on screen. If you have any shortage of screen real estate you will spend a lot of time switching or eventually printing help pages. For the cost, the Visual Quick Start guide is a good investment.
Normally the major shortcoming of the VQS series is that they do not provide the depth that most users need. This is not a problem with the Contribute guide because Contribute is not that deep of a program. At the same time, Contribute has some quirks in web creation that put a premium on doing things in the order the writers of the program intended. The guide does an excellent job of explaining these and therefore saving you time and aggravation.
Highly recommended.
(3 reviews)
