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2 Responses to “Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8”

1. Diana
   December 9th, 2009 at 12:22 pm

   While I thought the book “Macromedia Dreamweaver 8: Complete Concepts and Techniques (Shelly Cashman Series)” was a wonderful book for someone with no prior experience with Dreamweaver, this book took me to the next level with a more professional focus on web development and an emphasis on Cascading Style Sheets.
   Foundation Web Design with Dreamweaver 8 not only shows you how to do something, it shows you the best way to do it and why. It is filled with tips and minor hacks that will help you address problems you may encounter when designing a web site. Although this is not a book on CSS, there is definitely an emphasis on CSS. By the end of the book, you will have used all kinds of CSS selectors: Tag, Class, ID and Grouped selectors. This book has many tutorials, including creating a gallery, using floated content and creating a liquid layout with sidebars, creating navigation bars with rollover images, and much much much more.
   This book has black and white photos. Although I am a big fan of color, it really didn’t make a difference having the photos in black and white in this case. It does not come with a disk, instead you go to the publisher’s web site to download the files you will need for the tutorials.
   Rating: 5 / 5

2. JM
   December 9th, 2009 at 12:28 pm

   “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.
   Rating: 4 / 5