The CS3 Bible is both a great way to learn the program from scratch and a great reference when you need to solve a particular problem. There is more complete information than in the manual, and it is easier to use and learn from. If you have never used Dreamweaver before there is a nice set of tutorials and everything about using the program from a short and easily understood explanation of CSS to using programming language and integrating other adobe products. I keep this around for reference, and I have recommended it to others for learning the program.

Aside from the obvious, that it has nothing whatsoever to do with THE Bible, it's quite dry and un-informing. I'm unable to get much from the book; other than "history of the web" type stuff. Buy at your own risk.

Just speaking from one who does not build websites for a living. I purchased Dreamweaver to build our own company websites. We have used primarily Frontpage in the past for our basic websites, despite it's obvious limitations. So obviously there is a steep learning curve towards learning Dreamweaver. We are fairly competent with computers, but the biggest problem we have with this book is that it is so wordy. This book is over one thousand pages long, and the first one hundred pages do little more than describe Dreamweaver's features and attributes, without getting into any of the meat of how to actually run the software. Time is a limited commodity for us, and we don't need to wade through a thousand page book to find our answers.
I would agree that this is an excellent reference book, and I would recomend purchasing it to improve your web design capabilities, once you're already familiar with Dreamweaver. But I would prefer to see the big picture first. That is, I would rather learn the basics first, on how to run Dreamweaver, then learn about all of it's intricacies later.
So I would recomend this book as the second Dreamweaver book to read, if you are new to Dreamweaver. The first one should be more basic and more to the point.

This book, while daunting in size, is very accessible and contains everything you need to know about Dreamweaver CS3. I'm a designer, comfortable coding CSS/HTML but pretty green when it comes to things like XML and Spry. Other Dreamweaver books I looked at didn't have anything I didn't already know...so I knew they were lacking in a big way. This book takes you through every nook and cranny and when compared to others its astounding how glaring their shortcomings are and much more is in here. While you probably won't lay in bed reading this giant book it is by far the best and only book to consider for Dreamweaver. For me its serving as a springboard to learn other technologies/languages, so I'd have to say you'll learn a lot even beyond Dreamweaver. Covers the subject matter thoroughly and teaches you so much more...they didn't have to bother writing any other Dreamweaver books. This is the one.

I started CS3 using the all-in-one CS3 book for Dummies. It was a very good overview of the entire suite that helped get me going, but it wasn't long before I needed more detail. That's where this Bible comes in. I haven't read it cover-to-cover yet, but the individual sections provide the additional detail to take the frustration out of new tasks. I find this much more useful than the on-line Adobe articles. It would be nicer if the illustrations were in color, but that would also make the book much more expensive, so it's not a bad tradeoff.