Good hands on training but poorly bound.
I found this book to be very good in content especially for a beginner in Dreamweaver. The only drawback is that the book itself is not bound well. It literally fell apart very quickly after I received it with multiple groups of pages breaking away from the binding! I'm going to have to hole punch the pages and put them into a ring binder.
Great book for learning Dreamweaver
I bought this book to teach myself Dreamweaver and it did a pretty good job. It comes with a CD that has projects to work on as well as video tutorials to supplement the book. The author is pretty thorough in his explanations. The beginning two chapters may seem boring at first but in the end you realize they are quite informative and the information is necessary as a background before any real work can be executed correctly. This book covers everything from opening Dreamweaver for the first time to publishing your web page. Another great book for getting started is Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Revealed... I felt I should have read that one before this one because that one is a little more basic for when you are teaching yourself.
DreamWeaver 8 - great program
Dreamweaver 8 is a good product and fun to play with and learn.
Tons of tutorials online and in books.
Errors, Confusion, and BAD GLUE
Purchased for a college web design course, the first thing I noticed about this book is how poorly bound it is. As the previous reviewer also found, large sections of the book came loose within days, and I am very careful with books. The binding glue has completely failed, making the book difficult to use, and for a $53 (retail) textbook, that's a disgrace.
The content is okay, but I found a number of errors, actual mistakes in the exercises, which you do after copying the files on the enclosed CD to your machine. Some procedures were not in sequence, some DW functions no longer exist or are not where the authors say they are, background colors come out wrong despite following the instructions, etc. Expect to find anywhere from 1-4 errors per chapter, depending on how carefully you follow the exercises. The book uses a hypothetical website about "TeaCloud Teas" in every chapter, and it gets a bit tedious after a while. It could also use some independent exercises that do not revolve around the tea vendor website.
That said, you CAN learn a lot from this book, but you may have moments of frustration followed by anger at being slightly misled. There are better Dreamweaver learning tools out there. And probably some better glue...
Dreamweaver
The book material itself is fantastic and unbelievably easy to follow and understand. The craftmanship, if you will, of the book sucks. It literally started falling apart at the binding within 2 days of receiving it. I am not rough on the book by any means and do not transport it. It stays on my desk and I use it during my lunch hour. It has fallen apart and I have to keep a huge binder clip on it to keep all the pages intact.
