Product Description

When it comes to building professional websites, Dreamweaver CS4 is capable of doing more than any other web design program - including previous versions of Dreamweaver. But the software's sophisticated features aren't simple. "Dreamweaver CS4: The Missing Manual" will help you master this program quickly, so you can bring stunning, interactive websites to life. Under the expert guidance of bestselling author and teacher David McFarland, you'll learn how to build professional-looking websites quickly and painlessly.McFarland has loaded the book with over 150 pages of hands-on tutorials to help you create database-enabled PHP pages, use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for cutting-edge design, add XML-based news feeds, include dynamic effects with JavaScript and AJAX, and more. This witty and objective book offers jargon-free language and clear descriptions that will help you: learn how to control the appearance of your web pages with CSS, from the basics to advanced techniques; dsign dynamic database-driven websites, from blogs to product catalogs, and from shopping carts to newsletter signup forms; add interactivity to your website with ready-to-use JavaScript programs from Adobe's Spry Framework; efortlessly control the many helper files that power your website and manage thousands of pages; and examine web-page components and Dreamweaver's capabilities with the book's 'live examples'.Perfect for beginners who need step-by-step guidance, and for longtime Dreamweaver designers who need a handy reference to the new version, this thoroughly updated edition of our bestselling "Missing Manual" is your complete guide to designing, organizing, building, and deploying websites. It's the ultimate atlas for Dreamweaver CS4.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21278 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 1087 pages

About the Author
David Sawyer McFarland is the president of Sawyer McFarland Media Inc., a web development and training company located in Portland, Oregon. In addition, he teaches JavaScript programming, Flash, and web design at the University of California, Berkeley, the Center for Electronic Art, the Academy of Art College, and Ex'Pressions Center for New Media. He was formerly the webmaster at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center. David is also the author of CSS: The Missing Manual and Dreamweaver CS3: The Missing Manual.

Customer Reviews

Extremely useful book!
All books have a target audience so I think it's important to understand why I found this so useful - I'm someone who has only used Adobe Go Live 6 prior to this (about five software upgrades ago!!), which means that I may be familiar with many general website terms, but have absolutely no clue how to do anything in Dramweaver. This book was exactly at my level. It takes you through tutorials with a website in every chapter to help you put into practice what you've just learnt. Couldn't have been better in my view, but that's just me. What a great book.

Not what I thought,
After reviews of other missing manuals I thought this might be a help in learning the powers of Deamweaver CS4. It is very "in depth" of every feature in DW CS4 and lets you know every thing it can do. But what it lacks is a website you can build along as you read the book.
To put it another way. If you are learning to drive you can read a book on how to drive, but without actually driving you don't get the feel of being behind the wheel. But you would learn to drive a lot faster if you had driving lessons at the same time as reading a book on driving. What this book is lacking is a website you can build as you go along and put into practice what you read.
It is a good referance book on CS4, But not a good instruction manual.

Buy this book
I've been a user of Dreamweaver MX2004 and previous versions for 10 years. After buying Dreamweaver CS4 I realised much was familiar - I could carry on as usual without problems. However, I could see many new menu options and panels that were opaque to me. The CS4 help system was near to useless. What I needed was a manual and I got it by buying this book. It does what it says on the cover. It won't teach you PHP or Javascript or whatever, but you'll have a reference guide to every feature of Dreamweaver CS4.