Another excellent book!
I've been a fan of Peachpit Press books for a few years now. Their books are always well written and laid out to make them excellent for learning and later for reference. This book takes the somewhat confusing task of setting up a personal web server and breaks it down to a simple process.
Excellent, well-written, well-illustrated reference
This is an excellent learning tool and reference. It is written very well; the instructions are concise and clear. The book is well illustrated.
I don't think this is the best book to start with if you are just learning about dynamic applications. I would suggest that you begin with Jeffrey Bardzell's Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Dynamic Applications. If you are using DW8, don't worry--it's not out of date. The tutorials in Bardzell's book will enable you to build a web site using ASP or Coldfusion. (I am using ASP).
Lucinda Dyke's book, Macromedia DW 8 Advanced, will clearly explain and reinforce what you learned with Bardzell's book. With these two books, you should have no problem building a web site with dynamic applications.
The book has one flaw: the lack of complete exercise files. The author refers to the Cafe Townsend tutorial that comes with Dreamweaver, but these files do not completely correspond with the exercises. There are additional files that you can download from the Peachpit web site, but these files are not very helpful. You will have to improvise a little to complete some of the exercises. Hopefully, the author will get some feedback encouraging her to create a more fully set of files for download.
Also, if you want to learn how to create a web site using dynamic apps, it would be helpful to have a fundamental knowledge of databases.
Excellent book; well worth the money!
