Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8 Review

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Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8 Review"Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8" by Craig Grannell is a new title in the Foundation series from Friends of ED, a very impressive series of cutting-edge web-design books that mostly focuses on advanced design and programming techniques. The series is widely acclaimed for its no-nonsense, hands-on, thorough and thoroughly researched approach, with the backing of an outstanding user-to-user and author-to-user forum on its website.
"Foundation Web Design for Dreamweaver 8" is a bit of an anomaly in the series. It's definitely not an advanced book, and it's not terribly thorough. It would make an excellent introduction to CSS and to Dreamweaver for an old HTML hand who's about to make the move to standards-compliant, WYSIWYG webpage design, but it's definitely not suitable for someone who has no idea what HTML looks like, and anyone who has any familiarity with any of Dreamweaver's recent versions is likely to find the material overly elementary.
The editorial comments on the back cover of the book deride how "Most books about Dreamweaver are massive tomes that go through every menu option in painstaking detail." This book definitely is not massive -- it's just over 300 pages including the index, many unnecessary (and unnecessarily oversized) screenshots, and way too much whitespace at the bottoms of pages when an inline screenshot flows to the next page -- and it certainly doesn't go through every menu option. Indeed, many of the options aren't mentioned at all, with examples often telling you something on the order of "click A, enter B in the C box, select option D, hit OK" or "the default settings are fine" without really explaining what it all means. There are, for example, screenshots of all of Dreamweaver's insert bars spread out over three pages, but none of the dozens of individual icons on these bars is labeled or described.
For someone just getting his feet wet with Dreamweaver, this may be a great approach. After all, there's too much functionality in Dreamweaver to bother with all the little details on the first day out, and learning by doing is a great way to start. But the book is too basic to live up to the promise on the back cover of building anything "cutting-edge."
One thing very nice about the book is what the author calls its "modular nature." Because the author provides numerous, progressive versions of each example file (easily downloadable from the Friends of ED website), the reader can pick up any example at any point along the way with a fresh, correct copy of the necessary files as they should exist at that point in development process.
Like the other books in the Foundation series, the main font (Andale Sans) is easy to read, the paper stock is heavy and bright, and the few snippets of code are well-formated and clear. For some reason, however, the publishers chose a similar sans-serif font (Optima) for setting field names and dialog-box titles, for example, and since the book is printed in one color (black), it's hard to tell what's what. Also strange is that all of the text, background, and image colors in the sample websites are shades of grey -- even in the downloadable files. (I suppose the author didn't want people to appropriate his very nice designs for their own sites -- and with everything looking like something out of an old Bette Davis picture, there's no worry anyone will!)
So in summary, I can recommend this book for the Dreamweaver beginner who is already familiar enough with HTML to create a minimally complex webpage from scratch but who needs to be "shown around" Dreamweaver and who needs a gentle introduction to CSS. In the old days, software used to come packaged with two manuals: a thinner book called "Getting Started" that walked you through a program's main features mostly by example, and a thicker book called "User Guide" that gave every detail of every option of every feature. If you're looking for a "User Guide," this isn't it. But if you wish you had a basic "Getting Started" book for Dreamweaver, then look no further. This is it.Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8 OverviewDreamweaver is Macromedia's best-selling web design/development environment, and the updated version of Dreamweaver will be available later this year. Dreamweaver has the capability to generate dynamic website code using server-side languages like ASP, PHP, and ASP.NET. But this book focuses on the latest version of Dreamweaver in order to create usable, standards-compliant websites using XHTML and CSS. One of the highlights in the upcoming version is much closer, tighter CSS/XHTML.After a quick preamble about the new version of Dreamweaver, and how CSS and XHTML fit into it, author Craig Grannell looks at web design in Dreamweaver in a simplified, task-based manner-similar to his Web Designer's reference (ISBN 1590594304). He covers these tasks:- Setting up a site in Dreamweaver- Global web site essentials, such as dealing with doctypes, meta tags, comments, and page defaults, and attaching CSS and JavaScript files to your page- Styling page content properly using CSS- Working with images- Creating web site navigation- CSS for impressive page layouts that work- Getting user feedback via formsThen he rounds off the book with a final case study, showing how to put it all together. (Note that this is NOT a revision of Foundation Dreamweaver MX 2004 [ISBN 1590593081], although it will heavily reuse some of the material.)

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